Kigali (eBook)

A New City for the End of the World

Samuel Shearer (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
238 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-40998-9 (ISBN)

Infos

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Presss 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.

Inhalt

Contents
 
List of Illustrations
Preface
 
1. Introduction: Capital of the African Century
2. Production: Making an African Metropolis
3. Brand: Ruled by Fictions
4. Destruction: Making Fictions Real
5. Repair: Punk Urbanism
6. Recycle: Wasted Space
Epilogue: Urban Humanities for a Broken World
 
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
General Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 28.10.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• Schlagworte: African Studies • commercial development • Critical Urban Studies • Displacement • Environmental Geography • Greenwashing • neoliberal infrastructure • postcolonial development • urban planning
• ISBN-10: 0-520-40998-1 / 0520409981
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-40998-9 / 9780520409989