Award Information
This research focuses on Kigali City Master Plan—a fifty-year urban planning project that the Rwandan government and its 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 new and 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 the relationship between the material forces of global capital that destroy and create built environments and the utopian imaginaries that provide the vital energy for large-scale planning projects