ABOUT THIS BOOK

An examination of planning, place, and the politics of repair in post-genocide Rwanda.

Master Plans and Minor Acts examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation?

Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Shakirah E. Hudani is assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

REVIEWS

“Contemporary Kigali and Rwanda are often presented as gleaming models for a fantastic new urban Africa. This book provides a rigorous, well-researched and cautious set of caveats to the mythmaking, leaving the reader with a nuanced understanding of urban development in post-genocide Rwanda, the oft-claimed ‘Singapore of Africa.’ The ‘minor acts’ of the book are the small scale, alternative means of building urban community that run counter to the state’s fancy master plans and their near-constant dispossession—and this is where Rwanda’s real peacebuilding and reparative justice can take place.”

— Garth A. Myers, Trinity College

"In this outstanding new book, Shakira Hudani shows how the Rwandan state imposed a vision of post-conflict nationhood through urban planning – materially erasing and replacing memory with an engineered vision of neat social ordering. In the interstices of such violent forms of urban dispossession, Hudani finds “minor acts” of interpersonal conciliation and cooperation that offer limited, but necessary forms of repair amid the irreparable loss of the genocide. Beautifully written, and carefully argued Master Plans and Minor Acts is a major contribution to urban studies, African Studies, and post-conflict studies."

— Julie Livingston, New York University

"Over the last two decades enormous changes have been underway in the urban space of Rwanda’s capital Kigali, a reordering the post-genocide city as part of an ambitious state-led planning program to rebuild its social and material infrastructures. Master Plans and Minor Acts offers a brilliantly illuminating way to examine post-conflict repair and reckoning through the materiality of the city. Large-scale planning, Hudani argues, is a form of erasure that performs different forms of extraordinary violence through the built environment, at the costs of memory and organic remembrance, rather than the ‘minor acts’ that offer the prospects of repair and reconciliation. Master Plans and Minor Acts offers a compelling account of the relations between the material character of the city, state power, and the tasks of inhabiting the present."

— Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley

“Shakirah E. Hudani’s Master Plans and Minor Acts offers an impressive analysis of urban transformations in post-genocide Kigali and its surrounds. Looking beyond and below statist and transnationally financed capitalist infrastructural projects, Hudani proposes a “material politics of repair” for uncovering place-based and people-based reimagining of the palimpsestic city to reckon with the past, rebuild in the present, and reconstitute an ethical future. The “minor acts” of Hudani’s book contain the seed of sustainable urban dwelling in the aftermath of violence.”

— Cajetan Iheka, Yale University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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