Doctoral Dissertation Research: Exploring Environmental Design and Sustainable Development Strategies in an Urban Development Plan

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

The Co-PI, Samuel Shearer, under the supervision of the PI, Charles Piot, will explore how urban planning projects are managed, debated, and implemented in contexts undergoing rapid socioeconomic transformation. The research focuses on Kigali City Master Plan - a fifty-year urban planning project that the Rwandan government and its planning partners call a model of sustainable urban growth, environmental design, and economic development. Financed by international investors and outsourced to architecture firms in Singapore, and Boulder, Colorado, the Kigali City Master Plan is emblematic of flexible forms of urban planning that activate global networks of capital and expertise. The Master Plan also promises to demolish much of the city's current built environment to produce something entirely new: a holistic urban project, a vector of capital flow, and an entrée into the world economy. In the process hundreds of thousands of Kigali's residents will lose dwelling and work places. Yet surprisingly, those residents who are most vulnerable to losing their homes also dream along with urban planners and government officials of the better future the plan promises. Through informal interviews, participant observation, and critical analysis of the Master Plan and related media, this research will investigate this paradox and will examine the relationship between urban growth practices and the ideals that provide the vital energy for large-scale planning projects. In addition to anthropology, this research engages debates in urban studies, architecture and African studies. The research will examine how built spaces, are produced by social, political, and economic processes. This study will use the theoretical and methodological toolkit available in anthropology, geography, and political economy to engage debates over the planning process and its implementation and asks how the inhabitants of Kigali will share the social costs of producing their new city. In doing so, it aims to produce knowledge on a crucial question: how humans will inhabit a world that is increasingly becoming urban. The research also contributes to the training of a graduate student in anthropology.