Kigali: A New City for the End of the World
Samuel Shearer
Oct 2025 · Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century Book 20 · Univ of California Press
Ebook
238
Pages
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Eligible
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infoThis book will become available on October 28, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired American and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The firms produced promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. However, to make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed and its residents converted to consumers of green housing and service delivery systems.
Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city’s popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired American and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The firms produced promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. However, to make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed and its residents converted to consumers of green housing and service delivery systems.
Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city’s popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism.
About the author
Samuel Shearer is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
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