Kigali: Reconciling with the Planning Bureaucracy

Dimitri Nesbitt

Spring 2021 UPP 508 - Global Urbanization and Planning Professor: Dr. Sevin Yildiz

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s its ambitious plans move forward, Kigali’s method of urban governance remains an experiment in municipal longevity. The rapid restructuring of housing, economic vitality, transportation, and environmental management has ushered a distinct era for Rwanda that is definitively post-genocide. Yet, for its capital, the implications of a developmental state have produced uneven patterns of social and spatial integration with the aspirational visions of an African Singapore.

The driving force of these effects is the ideological realignment that Rwandan leaders have adopted and orchestrated: developmental patrimonialism.

Noted in Beaver et al. (2021), developmental patrimonialism identifies the willingness and engagement of sociopolitical elites to forgo shortterm wealth in favor of long-term, centralized strategies that consider increases to collective incomes.1 Because the framework’s economic decision-making are rights held by select, “expert” classes, these kinds of developmental states are oftentimes characterized by social contracts between the provider government and a broader public that has, in theory, internalized docility and non-resistance to the restructuring that affects them.

While analysis of developmental patrimonialism can and has produced economic transformation for Kigali, the governmentality of a capital imbued with

recent violence and reconciliation beckons an expanded look at Rwanda’s planning bureaucracy.2 3 Specifically, the systematic reengineering of what and how a post-genocide nation looks and functions in the globalized world is something, I argue, that is solely legitimized by a unsure response to reconciliation. As such, this extended section juxtaposes Kigali’s fractured urbanity with the exclusionary state that prepares it.

RELATING TO KIGALI The orchestrating figure, of course, is current president Paul Kagame.

His regime’s focus on economic prosperity for Rwanda has turned Kigali into a hub for decision-making for housing, transportation, and environmental matters. Beaver et al. (2021) analyzed these sectors for their impacts on building equitable and participatory communities, as well as alluding to the question of Kigali’s sustainable trajectory once Kagame is gone.4 Noted in each section was the determination that, despite impressive and measurable progress, the serious doubts casted on Kigali’s governmental longevity were warranted. Questions of human rights abuses, the castigation of dissent, and the spatiality of profitdriven privatization in the city remain a taste of the complex issues that also implicate the international community as co-conspirators.

In Kigali, less attention was focused on the spaces of resistance in these sectors. Instead, because of the government’s systematic hand, its management style was of greater interest in developing a foundation for Kigalien society. What is evident, however, is that resistances do exist, and that their continuation identifies a void in the government’s omnipresence, even if temporary.

This is important because it corresponds to a second departure from Kigali, in which a rethinking of who planners are and what planning is in Rwanda encompasses more of the nation-building process than previously acknowledged. In this vein, a dichotomy forms between the government and its resistors, both of whom are planners. However, the sheer administrative prowess of Kagame’s regime justifies a moniker of a “planning bureaucracy” for the Kigali city-building project.

Fiston Tours, 2020

ENGINEERING AN ALLIED IDENTITY

Wesley and Brandon Rosenblum, 2015

Preliminarily though, the need for appropriate reconciliation recalls the construction of nationalist identities in Rwanda that intensify in Kigali.

Forming nationalism involves the understanding that a political collective identity, sourced in limits and sovereignty, is a digestible and internalizable condition. (Endnote thesis). While effective at motivational statecraft, nationalism is an inherently exclusionary idea and has permitted acts of systematic violence throughout history. As written in Kigali, the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s eventual control of the government in 1994 began a period of statecraft that chose to homogenize its population.5 Promotion of the new Rwandan umbrella term sought to eliminate subnational identities, especially those with ethnic or culturally-specific usage. 6

Justified as preventions of future violence, these changes in identity illustrate the beginning of the planning bureaucracy in Rwanda, and its Kigalien throne. Acceptance of far-reaching, centralized structural projects required the docility of a population whose perceptions of fragmented social categories had been reformed. Likewise, erasure of subnational identities corresponds to a reduced argument for representative government because an essentializing identity would have represented all, in theory. Therefore, the modern Rwandan identity can be contextualized as a planned action that produced an identity more allied with decisions from the exclusionary, developmental state in Kigali.

SECURITIZING THE FUTURE In addition to the crafting of a national identity, Kigali’s built environment felt the ramifications of the social order. Streamlined into plans for reconstruction were administrative redistricting with boundaries favoring a growing capital city that could lead Rwanda into achieving a lofty 100%-urbanized goal. The city’s infrastructural projects--such as roads, transit systems, ecological and business parks, and extensively considered housing management-were inescapable for residents.

However, the collective mental and emotional condition of the postgenocide city likely contributed to the implementation of these initiatives.

As discussed by Goodfellow (2013), the population’s interest in a secure

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urban future originated in hopeful discourse, whereby the trauma, shame, and exhaustion of the genocide and the war could be mitigated.7 This is quantitatively evidenced by Beaver et al.’s (2021) mention of healthcare investments by the government as a critical first step in stabilizing Rwanda’s precarious wellbeing.8 Improved healthcare statistics, such as decreased mortality and increased life expectancy, are immediate and visible indicators of social change.

Successful experiences with an revamped healthcare system could have greenlit other public compliance with the government’s more spatially intrusive projects. Whether the government understood this to the degree of weaponizing it for social compliance, or whether it genuinely

adopted a health-oriented approach to Rwanda’s reconstruction, while important, is immaterial as the impacts on the broader public were the same. WIth the subsequent infrastructural projects, everyday Kigaliens transitioned into plan implementation. Tree planting, waste management, road construction-a parade of unpaid public works projects beckoned informal workers to participate in city-building, even if their lands were routinely expropriated.9 10 Therefore, the contractual social characteristic of developmental governance is identified again, whereby coercion solely by the state is not entirely accurate--in Kigali, it involved the acceptance of a new order by the city’s most vulnerable.

THE MASTER PLAN’S GEOGRAPHIES OF INEQUALITY Among the major differences in tiered governance in Rwanda that favors Kigali over the country’s secondary cities is the use of a master plan. While officially a municipal document, the master plan involves conceptual elements that stem directly from Kagame’s cabinet narratives and operationalize ministry objectives by programming their funding dollars. As mentioned in Beaver et al. (2021), the capital region, since its redistricting into its own capital province, still only accounts for 9.1% of the national population.11 Yet, the narratives of urgency and crises, particularly those concerning housing and workforce availability, justify Kigali’s disproportionate funding appropriations.12 The return of post-genocide 4

refugees and diasporic populations concentrating in the capital started the formal planning [in a traditional sense] process for the city in 1999, when the Kigali Conceptual Master Plan was disseminated. While not earmarking appropriations to particular projects, the plan detailed what spatial interventions the community ought to consider. Many of these ideas were subsequently pursued as policy proposals with programmatic infrastructure in strategies targeting development, employment, and poverty 13 reduction. Others were revised into the 2013 City Master Plan (and its successor editions), that began full implementation of the spatial reordering, including profit-oriented land grabs and the transition of land availability from providing

agricultural jobs to service-oriented employment.14 However, just as the 1999 plan outlined what kinds of development Kigali’s municipal planners should actively consider, it dually informed the kinds of spatial uses that were disfavorable. It represents a more localized and provincial mechanism of Rwanda’s developmental patrimonialism that is exclusionary to all but the same elites that created the plan--i.e. the planning bureaucracy at work, yet again. This is so encoded into the city’s denial of the realities of its planning process that it openly touts how participatory it is. They conveniently forget to identify the types of audience members present for those meetings.

Kigali’s Built Versus Unbuilt Environments

Urban Extent Urban Built-Up Suburban Built-Up Rural Built-Up Urbanized Open Space Exurban Area Exurban Built-Up Area Exurban Open Space Rural Open Space Atlas for Urban Expansion, 2015

Nowhere is this preventative planning more pronounced than with Kigali’s informal settlements. The initial 1999 conceptual plan accepted the reality of the city’s low-density, horizontal typologies popping up among informal settlements.15 Yet, the intervention of these neighborhoods with substandard infrastructure remains a prescriptive approach from urbanization patterns and practices that are imported, primarily from the Singaporean model. Within this narrative, the planning bureaucracy does not acknowledge the validity of informal settlement districts because they interrupt the progression of the Kigali master vision. Much of Kigali’s structures are deemed irregular, according to imported building codes, and the officials often utilize environmental degradation

as justification to ostracize informality.16 17And yet, the master plans, themselves, have not fully accounted for the transitioned land use for once informal settlements are cleared and their displaced residents moving further into the peripheries.18 Evidenced are the noticeably empty plots of overturned land surrounded by gentrified neighborhoods waiting for glass towers to be built.

economic context, parts of the Kigali City Master Plan are euphemistic steps for land expropriation, particularly when paired with Kagame’s ministries’ efforts to form a service-based economy. On one hand, Rwanda has recognized that dependency on agricultural production alone is unsustainable for a country its size. On the other, however, the expropriation of lands in areas economically productive for Even so, the elite group of the lower-income residents, while in line planning bureaucracy administers with systematic economic overhaul, the vision on behalf of the entire is a setback for integration into the capital population. These figures “formal” Kigali that the government are sanctioned by the federal wants, seeing as the affected government’s aligned priorities in populations are pushed further into economic development, and they are the capital’s peripheries.20 shrouded by the forces of globalized capital that have been courted to operate from Kigali.19 Within this 5

RESISTING THE VISION The master planning arena, itself, is not a clean dichotomy between those belonging to the planning bureaucracy and those living in informal settlements that are patrimonialized by the planning process. As noted by Goodfellow (2013), the international community, particularly those actors assessing economic and trade indicators, criticized the master plan for its delusional and grandiose assumptions of the global economy.21 Furthermore, within internal operations familiar with how many many interconnected strategic and comprehensive plans disproportionately center Kigali supposed conditions, dissent is even clearer, with the recognition that they are planning “a virtual design

Kristina Just, 2009

for another city, not the actual Kigali that exists.”22 For residents of informal settlements, the effects of master planning produces a duality in behavior that both instigates a self-advocacy for their assets and political acquiescence for how the city modernizes.23 The 2015 Expropriation Law, for example, formalizes the clearance of urban informality, but is a process halted by the settlements’ desires for appropriate restitution.

Monetary compensation, as a right, functions as a way for dissent towards Kigali’s plan to operate within judicial processes, as opposed to more visible and vocal unrest.24 However, in many instances, courts have dismissed cases

on petty logistical grounds and have ruled in favor of the city; likewise, media coverage that unfailingly praises the planning bureaucracy’s modernization efforts oftentimes labels informal settlement residents as greedy instigators that stall the capital’s progress.25 The developmental state, as noted by Beaver et al. (2021), therefore, is actively participating in gentrification and displacement along multiple social and structural channels.26 Likewise, despite the judicial process, even when proper compensation is awarded, remains a superficial channel--plots of land will continue to change ownership and the vision of a gleaming Kigali marches on.

RECONCILING WITH REALITY The condition of the behavioral duality, however, involves the awareness of informal settlement dwellers’ positionality within the new Rwandan structure. In part, all of Kigali has been socially engineered by the planning bureaucracy to adopt new cultural standards of what makes a good urban resident.

This securitization of the city was more than a militaristic approach to order, but involved the manipulation of organic neighborhood systems by disrupting the spatiality of their residents’ livelihoods. For housing, this includes the quick disregard of Kigali’s immediate post-genocide living crisis, in which land ownership was contested by current residents and those returned, or surviving families being forced to share living spaces with neighbors who had participated in genodical acts.27

resident and the city-building state extends into how accountability is realistically pursued and internalized for each party.

Yet, as Beaver et al. (2021) discussed, the state’s development of housing, employment, transportation, and natural resources is a prescriptive, imported model that hinges on the state’s ability to maintain order.29 The longevity of master planning for Kigali depends on how much the case for its spatial reorganization makes sense for its residents.30 For those continually being displaced into peripheries, so that their informal settlements become sports, entertainment, or hospitality districts with no feasible employment opportunities for them, the dream of Kigali quickly becomes a nightmare. This corresponds to a mention of dissent from Goodfellow (2013), describing how the politics These are objectively deep of silence is not “particularly and painful situations that an conducive to effective and inclusive emotionally burdened population urban development because it limits needs time to process, yet it remains dialogue over the complex trade-offs uncertain whether or not a focus and possible negative consequences on infrastructure and development of urban transformation.”31 is a sufficient solution. Goodfellow (2013), instead, chooses to change In this manner, the genocide, itself, the narrative of resistance and reenters the conversation. The reconciliation culture to one of a modern conflict of violent dissent, “politics of silence.”28 Under this the Rwandan Genocide underscored framework, the malleability of how horrific systematic and structural Kigali’s residents is a conscious disputes could be. Whereas closure decision that factors in the country’s of that conflict may have arrived traumatic past, the responsibility of for some Kigaliens, the swept-aside the resident in bringing the vision nature of the conflict, complete with for the future, and an evaluation of criminalization of ethnic individuality resistance to determine its viability and the creation of a nationalistic and worth. As such, open dissent identity, is indicative of a process of is another contractual condition healing that happens underneath of developmental patrimonialism, the surface. However, with each whereby the relationship between the subsequent implementation of the

master plan, the planning bureaucracy proves that Kigali is not conflict-free or that it has effectively harnessed trauma for building the grand vision.

That is because it remains in the interest of the planning bureaucracy to not permit channels of political, economic, and spatial contestation to become legitimate. Doing so breaks with the developmental patrimonial contract and undermines the new order Kagame has built. Yet, as the markers of global inequality continue to manifest in Kigali, a different breaking point is sure to come.

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RECONCILING WITH REALITY The markers of a painful recovery are still ingrained in Kigali’s development, yet the longevity and stability of its developmental patrimonialism remains unclear. Although many Rwandan institutions, particularly those of city-building, urbanism, and economic development of its capital, are advised directly by their Singaporean model, the exclusionary governance socially reproduces a planning bureaucracy. With origins in the post-genocide aftermath and the creation of an essentializing nationalistic identity, the planning bureaucracy in Kigali is the organ that sustains itself and instills order, oftentimes through spatial reordering.

but the reordering of structures renders these challenges minute, and a propagandizing social network labels obstructionists as greedy. It is in this context that pathways for expressing resistance take the form of politics of silence, whereby Kigaliens take stock of their positionalities, losses, and gains, to form a culture of compliance with the developmental state. Yet, the continuation of this system, one that discourages retrospective thinking about past atrocities, is headed towards a reckoning, as Kigali manifests the hallmarks of a global city--complete with its wealth gaps. As in Kigali, the result of this grand experiment will test developmentalism in Africa, An undercurrent exists, however, particularly once Paul Kagame is that produces flashes of resistance, gone.

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REFERENCES 1 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

2

Ibid.

3 Booth, D. and Golooba-Mutebi, F. (2012). Developmental patrimonialism? The case of Rwanda, African Affairs, 11(444), 379-403.

4 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

5

Ibid.

6 Benken, E. A. (2017). Nowhere to go: informal settlement eradication in Kigali, Rwanda. University of Louisville.

7 Goodfellow, T. (2013). “Kigali 2020: the politics of silence in the city of shock,” OpenDemocracy.

8 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

9

Ibid.

10 Goodfellow, T. (2013). “Kigali 2020: the politics of silence in the city of shock,” OpenDemocracy.

11 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

12 Esmail, S. and Corburn, J. (2019). “Struggles to remain in Kigali’s ‘unplanned’ settlements: the case of Bannyahe,” Environment & Urbanization, 32(1), 19-36.

13 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

14

Ibid.

15 Benken, E. A. (2017). Nowhere to go: informal settlement eradication in Kigali, Rwanda. University of Louisville.

16 Goodfellow, T. (2013). “Kigali 2020: the politics of silence in the city of shock,” OpenDemocracy.

17 Baffoe, G., Malonza, J., Manirakiza, V., and L. Mugabe. (2020).

“Understanding the Concept of Neighbourhood in Kigali City, Rwanda,” Sustainability 2020, 12(1555).

18 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

19 Esmail, S. and Corburn, J. (2019). “Struggles to remain in Kigali’s ‘unplanned’ settlements: the case of Bannyahe,” Environment & Urbanization, 32(1), 19-36.

20 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

21 Goodfellow, T. (2013). “Kigali 2020: the politics of silence in the city

of shock,” OpenDemocracy.

22

Ibid.

23 Akinyemi, F. O. and Bigirimana, F. (2012). “A Spatial Analysis of Poverty in Kigali, Rwanda using indicators of household living standard,” Rwanda Journal, 26(Series B) 24 Esmail, S. and Corburn, J. (2019). “Struggles to remain in Kigali’s ‘unplanned’ settlements: the case of Bannyahe,” Environment & Urbanization, 32(1), 19-36.

25 Baffoe, G., Malonza, J., Manirakiza, V., and L. Mugabe. (2020).

“Understanding the Concept of Neighbourhood in Kigali City, Rwanda,” Sustainability 2020, 12(1555).

26 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

27

Ibid.

28 Goodfellow, T. (2013). “Kigali 2020: the politics of silence in the city of shock,” OpenDemocracy.

29 Beaver, A., Mizner, P., Nesbitt, D., and N. Pellegrini. (2021). Kigali. (Unpublished graduate project). UPP 508: Global Urbanization and Planning, Dr. Sevin Yildiz, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

30 Baffoe, G., Malonza, J., Manirakiza, V., and L. Mugabe. (2020). “Understanding the Concept of Neighbourhood in Kigali City, Rwanda,” Sustainability 2020, 12(1555).

31 Goodfellow, T. (2013). “Kigali 2020: the politics of silence in the city of shock,” OpenDemocracy.

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Prepared by: Dimitri Nesbitt