The Kigali story, the Singapore model, and rights to the city

Abstract

Bock, Stephen. 2018. Translations of urban regulation in relations between Kigali (Rwanda) and Singapore. xiii + 338 pp., figs, tables. Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2018. Hudani, Shakira E. 2024. Master plans and minor acts: repairing the city in post-genocide Rwanda. 258 pp., figs. Chicago: University Press, 2024. $32.50 (paper). Shearer, Samuel. The Kigali model: making a 21st century metropolis. Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2017. Three recent ethnographies of Kigali's urban planning and development provide a welcome addition to a long tradition of such ethnographies, including Lisa Redfield Peattie's famous fieldwork in the planning of Ciudad Guayana (1968; 1987), Grace Goodell's ethnographic account of the disjunction between planning offices in Tehran and the urban settlements (sharaks) of the Khuzistan Development Project modelled on the Tennessee Vally Authority (1986), and Gökce Günel's ethnographic analysis of the disjunction between plans for, and implementation of, Mazdar City and Mazdar Institute in Abu Dhabi (2019). Kigali, often dubbed ‘the African Singapore’, provides a model for thinking about new urban formations in Africa and elsewhere (see Pype, Adunbe & Fischer 2025), the circulation of planning consultancies, and the key social issues of dealing with informal settlements, overcrowding, and rights to the city. Having worked in Singapore for the past decade or so, I was long interested in the claim of the Singapore consultancy, and town planning agency within Singapore (Surbana), to have provided the planning for Kigali as well as a number of other cities in Africa. It was one of several initiatives to sell Singapore's expertise (industrial parks in China; port management in Turkey). A two-week intensive visit to Rwanda, including to its new district hospital and University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, a poor region of the north – both initiatives of the anthropologist Paul Farmer and Partners in Health – in the company of Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin (a long-time ethnographer in Rwanda whose network gave access to several of Rwanda's strategists), enhanced my desire to further ‘read for the ethnography’. ‘Reading for the ethnography’ is my slogan for creating a detailed empirical basis for theory building, evaluation of ethnographic writing, cultural critique, and the transnational circuitry of post-globalization. Reading for the ethnography is the ‘ground-truthing’, or finer grained precision, of claims of theory, just as aerial photography requires on-the-ground verification and often alternative understandings: What is the evidence? How well does the text demonstrate linguistic and cultural competence in eliciting emic accounts? Are there other accounts in the literature, other histories of the specific places, or alternative explanations? In the present comparison of three ethnographies of the same city and administrative structures, I pay attention to the ethnographic facts that each adduces that I can use to create a mosaic understanding of different parts of the city, different local histories of settlement and redevelopment, and different evolving plans versus local resistance or counter-movements of residents, and how the interlocutors and informants evaluate, complain, or take advantage of changing effects of city planners, global financing, and of organic incremental growth and ad hoc solutions. The three ethnographies are not quite like the elephant and the three blind men, but they present remarkably different accountings of how, where, and when things happened, even if at some points they draw upon similar generalizing language about financial and administrative logics and forces. I am interested in the way their empirical ethnographic materials complement each other to create a baseline for further inquiry – on Kigali, but also for comparative work across cities that face similar (but locally different) problems. I emphasize the ethnographic history of Singapore itself to counter the cliches, again looking for the precise ethnographic and historical evolutions in its experience, and the role of the Surbana town planning consultancy in Singapore and as it attempts to sell its experiences and expertise elsewhere. Writing about Kigali in transition must negotiate visionary ambitions and promissory publicity together with ‘ground truthing’, tracking emergent forms of social organization and struggles for rights to the city, along with gender relations, and visions of the good life. The three ethnographies proved to be quite different in focus and evidentiary basis. Stephan Bock embedded himself in the urban planning ministries of Rwanda, and at the Surbana consultancy offices in Singapore, to examine the role of Surbana's master plans and building regulations for Kigali. Samuel Shearer embedded himself in the street vendor markets and informal settlements looking to how their residents try ‘to defend their collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. 5). Shakira Hudani focuses on three types of resettlement areas to which people evicted from informal settlements are moved. As the terms ‘master plans’ and ‘speculative urbanism’ indicate, the forces are not merely local or contained within nation-states, but are imaginaries and financial forces circulating the globe. Kigali, Shearer suggests, has joined Singapore to be ‘on the forefront in a revolution of how cities are managed, lived, and imagined everywhere’ (p. 5). But Shearer is also an excellent guide to resistance and pushback from the people being managed. He takes a critical view of the master plan process ‘written by consultants in Singapore, funded by multinational investment corporations, to be exported from Kigali’ (p. 5). The ‘world class city’ for him does not actually produce the built environment it promises, but, ‘by activating global networks of capital and expertise with a compelling visual narrative about a city's future potential’, subverts the tactics available for use by the less advantaged city residents to have a stake in the city (p. 5). He claims the ‘international team of managers and consultants have “liberated” planning from the political and economic relations that paralyze planners in other cities’ (p. 5). His own excellent ethnography shows otherwise, or at least that it is not the whole story. Following Michael Goldman (2011), he asserts that the goals of ‘speculative urbanism’ are to create real estate investment opportunities. But, as Bock points out, money is required to build a city, and money-strapped Rwanda needed private-public investment to generate urban budgets but also ways to extract money from, and give ownership to, its own population. As Beng-Huat Chua, Singapore's leading sociologist and loyal critic, demonstrates, the housing mechanism in Singapore built the state through forced savings that the state could then leverage (Chua 2024). Rwanda, too, has a state mechanism to shape investment and growth: the national pension program (eligibility is paid contributions for fifteen years). Construction, in large part, is financed by three state-connected funds (Goodfellow & Smith 2013). Rwanda's political-administrative structure of districts, sectors, cells, imidugudu (the smallest formal unit of a hundred or so households) and an informal nyumbacumi (person overseeing ten households) is analogous to the organization of Singapore's People's Action Party's voluntary organizations and community centres built into housing estates (though not down to the same formal degree of ten households). Goodfellow and Smith provide an overview of the struggle to organize the city of Kigali between 1994 and 2000, and to prevent the race riots that Singapore experienced in its early days of independence and government consolidation. What is often called the ‘Singapore model’ is just one element of planning and design in a complex process of ‘from third world to first in one generation’ (in Lee Kuan Yew's famous tag line for ‘the Singapore Story’) or from low-income to middle-income country (in Paul Kagame's). Shearer, while criticizing aspects of Singapore's consultancy in Kigali notes that the whole idea was that the plan should pay for itself by attracting foreign capital. Furthermore, ‘what is called the Singapore model’ is ‘not because it follows that city's transformation, but because it conjures an idea of what global “city-ness” should look like, with Singapore as a reference’ (p. 131). The conjuring, he says, is ‘what Surbana sells’. It has sold ninety master plan projects in thirty countries mainly in Asia and Africa. These are promissory visions, and become integrated as one layer in cascades of implementation, with all the contingencies, blockages, and redesign involved. ‘Participatory planning’ is a buzz-word component (one that Lisa Redfield Peattie championed) but that Shearer points out in Rwanda today is often really participatory expropriation, letting coops and associations ‘purchase their own property and take out loans to develop that property’, often against the will (or lack of choice) of the participants (p. 139); a harsher version of the ‘forced savings’ that Beng-Huat Chua describes for Singapore. So how did this process get started? Here Bock is helpful. Pundits, Bock says, regularly give Rwanda good marks for economic development and bad marks for authoritarianism and human rights violations. But such binaries, he argues ‘do not help to disentangle the complexity of relations and interactions’. He calls for multi-locale and multi-scalar ethnographic approaches. He watched Kigali develop from 2006 when there were only a few hotels and government buildings taller than a single storey, no traffic lights, and only mini-buses for public transportation. By 2011 there were cleared areas waiting for redevelopment, traffic lights, and larger buses. In the immediate post-genocide years, emergency attention had to be given to the city, of the and and of and is an to the early of Singapore, both urban that the and were and people were into Kigali had and and City a as well as city master plan for a master plan with some from the and The first Kigali Master was by the consultancy in Singapore's Surbana was in to a master and in The dubbed Kigali Kigali as Bock and with a street of and of Shearer is for the he and Bock with real the focus with residents, and building a that had to work there were no real or have had in the in 1994 and the of the a of urban out from a public and into and with community and to on the informal settlement the markets as to be and paid and the settlements needed and use But a master plan is not just a it is a to a new city did some detailed planning for and building In an of of Kigali's But how to Bock to Singapore and in were to Singapore, and In Surbana the for detailed planning of Kigali's and A Surbana was within the Kigali planning (the Surbana of Kigali in to it to the plans and to the an to on as and a way for to from their to their be in the master were about the in the of housing needed and that into or housing than Beng-Huat Chua, in ‘Singapore as model’ (2011), that the model be only can The Singapore government of the and could and with a good Singapore could in the to or in the financial this to Surbana as claims to have planning projects in thirty countries (in and and In Singapore it has create of a In Rwanda, the structure of the political was from the in which the were given of with the to be and and work were not the and in the state to the city was not people their were Bock were in to by were to produce and But in the and early global and and a provides an that in the and from to for the of and the development of this the with and with and Bock a government a country such as the only is that of a that can and the economic some from the and the key was as of the was today in the so, a key focus was to use consultants for and but Singapore, with an that had to become participants in the planning not just of Paul in had a of to plan the development of the country from to middle-income by in 2000, a team to to about of A was to Rwanda for from the which also from countries to create a The Rwanda Development the of the Development of was to as a for Rwanda's in the global of the for The Rwanda The Development and for on to and to focus on urban use and master Hudani argues that the planning of a state is to a of social issues of rights to the city, and incremental of and social argues that one Rwanda as a of urban the was the in when the in a of and again today with the of and in and claims upon of three different and types of development Shearer that three urban are each and the urban of the built and social have the of urban and visual to and housing of are on to with on-the-ground with the people could help such in with in all three ethnographies, but to the Singapore are accounts of to as of a national to human capital. 2000, Singapore funded for and at and the of the or their own have to a number of for and have funded to and and along with multinational Rwanda is to The new and University of Global Health Equity in with and the is to provide for and across the African like the of and of the University of Rwanda in Kigali, were built with local and attention to the Kigali's economic the for (one of the of the against to an and development to provide for countries in the African the first such on the African 2024). also – of the of but to the focus on the urban planning – are of Singapore, this the on and parks on and in was an economic an plan by of & Rwanda, it the from through and the it has through the ethnographies to emergent forms of social and struggles for rights to the city, a of historical relations are a and history that further account of street and of and also of an African of that and forms of are the Rwanda has the of in than other as well as a number of government Shearer, a with a of by a local at and were to prevent from a by a street to pay a to local or community are to and but, in this not only was the but the the city's master which and the for The not only the but called a as the were the the work community the of the is a of produce and sell of produce that they have or on from or and on the in the world in and are locally and sold as in are then or by and as than as or are called is in this is than which there is also a or of into and of and and The street have their own so each or to use the to pay down are single with each and often of making a and by the that pay less than or for and in the some for were to the Shearer says, narrative of Kigali as an state with a that the and of is (p. The the the and The to down for a for a few and then the city, street informal settlements, and are a and and Shearer, the that stake for urban residents in the century is how to defend collective resources against the liquidating processes of speculative urbanism’ (p. Shearer provides and of informal settlements in of were and by the and The had to but only for the not the which it to the the and work people to to what they The residents also their own to the were just and to a new housing by the pension ethnographic is of the or of Kigali are called by their but by of other famous informal settlements (or or are or things and in in the (in poor Shearer is for the and which he by the had become he the development state of was for of the the and could well from the and with foreign and and a of and and In the In the Rwanda from The were by It Shearer says, the of the and for and from the city to out the some to the as a to use against the (p. Shearer the of the street and but he is no that their tactics of and are a real alternative He describes the in of the built in and of other such in an to into new in from their and for than In a ethnographic he describes the of the to provide to informal settlements such as on Kigali. by a (the by the to the Rwanda the residents the for the state the and the also further residents have to to the and for The of capital for that can provide no is not to Rwanda. Shearer at one in that urban development in Kigali about social and about a by a (p. and that this has political and financial resources (in their transnational network of managers and to to their speculative (p. he how could a city be and built within the of Hudani provides of three types of to people from informal settlements to way for new to a new housing complex an urban attracting investment at the of or informal settlement and model a of and shows the of and needed for urban and as with for and and the of and districts, and on a that the master plans residents of were to or their which they had built from of then with and then with as they for the state to and resettlement to to a built housing estate or a settlement to, of their and was really The new were and the unit was the could not get terms from the Rwanda by the because it not as or about to be housing not with they were being housing in for first with people that provided that be in the was for a development by a investment A of property hundred in for a settlement the new to down their own in a of that also in the when the state to organize into settlement and new building such as of The residents of the of urban in as by the the same that the against is from the and to from the As Hudani ‘the political that Kigali's is by the use of the state of to give an of is that the of of urban and to the than informal settlements with and as in and in other cities in which and informal building to political for and into the city, Hudani says, the master plan the informal settlement for investment by transnational capital. Hudani describes as to the street at the and the when there were and and and some provided a social of collective life. As built to leading to The urban of just the and the the of Kigali, and of the 1994 were It has become a new of In the the from the and elsewhere to and to get to work as the for settlement of the (in and and were are Hudani that the of the in in 1994 the large number of from elsewhere. is an urban a of new by a new in financed by with a of by as well as a new and (in a government with and the a and a The and other new are by the of the Singapore Authority The on the way to the is being by it will in A and in other model all and administrative can be has to this also help create between districts, and countries to the of cities in investment and Rwanda is to be the to The was to districts, and were to and on provided and Hudani there are paid by and by the national as well as local are by to on with – to and Hudani called and by the is by cities to Hudani the urban poor are from to in of and with new building and are the poor whose is and for or for and are in new housing and The third of is the model was in as of a Development at first in of a and built of with by the program to the of such were to be built by 2024. is the that and foreign are to Hudani calls it a the is not the is to from they or for their and to was a resettlement for It was as being a of by and modelled on or in in the in the and and had similar as did development state In Hudani or was to Rwanda and other African The was to in and of people from different In that between and a people households) were to imidugudu to the into and to the social organizations of Hudani to the but which also could resistance to state Hudani that experienced forced and were to their own and to imidugudu settlement building materials in The the complexity of claims to and in by people or into imidugudu is not but it the model is an to the and to three it is also not how the goals of are Hudani Rwanda a by from The of the is claims that in of the in and were The of Bock, Shearer, and fieldwork as and a of and processes in urban as well as political or economic Singapore's Surbana was to Kigali, and Singapore an in in of urban in in attracting foreign and in use of of and into not only but also to or both as a and as a while to from or or into and such as and provide into local and as such as account of resistance to and of local points in to informal of Singapore, and can the of and at The the and of the Kigali in a poor projects demonstrate Rwanda's and they can be about He also the as a model for a to Bock shows how that investment can be and to prevent capital from are not only the of housing in social or and Singapore, but also the of social for in 2024). are – and – through private-public or incremental from to as in in and in The is in the struggle and was given the to versus the that try to the rights to the city and the of that provide an urban economic the Singapore but not its social The three ethnographies of Bock, Shearer, and Hudani provide three different the and city’ to about the circulation of and consultancies, as well as struggles to rights to the city, a not only of social but of cultural and social and Michael Fischer is in the and of and and at the Institute of as well as a in Global Health and at He is of ten including on between and to between and and in the on theory as with of and the and in the on Singapore and of and the of and and and on and cities in Africa. He a at Duke University so He has a of on and in and and an with and an anthropologist of Rwanda on as