Kigali and Kigali: Reconciling with the Planning Bureaucracy | 2021
Global Urbanization and Planning
Skills:
team collaboration | research | design | project management | professional writing
Tools:
World Bank | Adobe Creative Suite
Description:
These joint documents, constituting a group midterm and individual final, qualitatively research the governmentality and implementation of planning in Kigali, Rwanda. Planning is studied along housing, the economy, transportation, and environmental axes through a framework of developmental patrimonialism to ask the question of whether or not Kigali’s urban planning is sustainable under the current Rwandan regime.
The individual final extends the governance analysis in what I refer to as the “Planning Bureaucracy,” a structure for urbanizing Rwanda in which I question its efficacy. Examples of uneven urban and social development are utilized to inform of plural planning, resistance, and securitization among Rwandans who live out the Kigali municipal experiment.
Responsibilities:
- Researched and wrote nuanced analytical understandings of developmental patrimonialism; economic policy, visioning, and centrality; urban inequalities; authoritarian urbanism and planning resistances.
- Conducted literature review of developmental patrimonialism in primate cities and urban environments for comparative study, Singapore in particular.
- Led the production of a stylized report and developed an organizational hierarchy to information using color, fonts, and visuals.
- Both the midterm and final earned the highest possible score in the course.
Excerpt from Kigali:
“Kigali’s own history of colonial legacy, state interventions in globalized capitalism, and political allyship between the government and many socioeconomic classes suggest that conditions of Singapore’s transformation are replicable in Rwanda.”
–-from section on Developmental Patrimonialism
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