Kigali
A New City for the End of the World
- Auteur: Samuel Shearer
- Soort boek: boek over de hoofdstad van Rwanda
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: University of California Press
- Verschijnt: 28 oktober 2025
- Uitgave: paperback / ebook
- Prijs: $ 34,95
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Samuel Shearer Kigali review en recensie
- “Samuel Shearer brilliantly exposes the heart-wrenching hypocrisy of Western-implemented ideas of sustainable urbanism and green capitalism in the Global South. This lucidly argued and elegantly written book is an important addition to a growing scholarship on urban humanities from Africa and on degrowth.” (Kenda Mutongi, author of Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi)
- “This is an innovative, insightful, and imaginative work that challenges stereotypes of Africa as backward or behind while emphasizing the vitality and resilience of African agency in remaking the popular city.” (William Bissell, author of Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar)
Flaptekst van het boek over Kigali van Samuel Shearer
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.
Samuel Shearer is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.