Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda"
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Shakirah E. Hudani
Air Date: September 18, 2025

Overview

This episode features a rich conversation between Dr. Miranda Melcher and Dr. Shakirah E. Hudani about Hudani’s book Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (University of Chicago Press, 2024). The discussion explores how state-driven urban transformation in post-genocide Rwanda intersects with memory, dispossession, social repair, and everyday acts by residents. Hudani weaves together interdisciplinary insights, focusing on Kigali and other urban and peri-urban spaces, to reveal how master plans not only organize space but also attempt to control narratives and lived experiences in the aftermath of profound violence.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Author’s Background and Motivation

[03:12]

• Dr. Hudani introduces herself as an urban studies and planning scholar focusing on African cities, urbanism in the Global South, and post-conflict transition.
• Her research roots stem from personal histories, growing up between East Africa and North America, and early fieldwork (2002-2004) in Rwanda studying local participatory courts (gacaca) in the wake of the genocide.
• She connects spatial transformation with post-genocide transition, seeking to understand how urban environments both reflect and shape efforts at repair and reconciliation.

2. Book’s Central Questions and Themes

[09:08]

• Examines how government master plans stabilize national narratives of unity and progress.
• Explores the relationship between spatial planning, processes of dispossession, and the ongoing nature of repair in a post-conflict society.
• Dispossession is read both as a loss (material, social) and as a relational encounter—drawing on Judith Butler and Levinas.
• Investigates grassroots and neighborhood-level acts that challenge or adapt to state-driven narratives.

3. The Meaning and Operation of "Master Plans"

[11:41]

• Master plans are more than technical urban planning instruments; they are “spatialized master narratives” with mnemonic, social, and political implications.
• Identifies three historically layered "master plans":
  1. Post-genocide state aftermaths
  2. The colonial present
  3. The contemporary spatial "post-crisis fix," typified by projects like the Singaporean-designed 2013 and 2019 Kigali plans.
• These plans attempt to order territory and population, often marginalizing informal, local memories and practices.

Notable Quote:

"The master plan... must be read in mnemonic, social, and political terms for how it serves as a metaphor for ordering space and populations over time."
—Dr. Shakirah Hudani, [12:38]

4. “Minor Acts” and Everyday Agency

[14:43]

• “Minor acts” are everyday gestures and material exchanges that foster repair and conciliation at home and neighborhood levels.
• Such acts serve as powerful, though often overlooked, forms of agency: “Minor acts offer us salient ways to reimagine relationality through repair.” [15:43]
• They stand in contrast to the top-down interventions of master plans, offering alternative visions for inhabiting the city.

5. Why Urban Space?

[16:43]

• Rwanda’s deep urban–rural divide makes the urban question vital for understanding national change.
• Repair is conceptualized as a material and social process—exemplified in local courts where residents sought compensation for small, tangible losses (e.g., bricks, roofing tiles), which provided crucial ground for social healing.
• Old neighborhoods in Kigali contain hidden networks of memory and meaning that persist beneath new planning efforts.

Notable Quote:

“Not all these memories are easy memories... But they help long-term residents to see through the facades of the changing city and ask critical questions about transformation.”
—Dr. Shakirah Hudani, [18:47]

6. Social Memory, Survivors, and the New Urban Plan

[22:41]

• New master plans for Kigali barely accommodate organic, lived forms of memory, instead sometimes “museumizing” old neighborhoods in ways survivors find insufficient.
• Many feel excluded as master narratives and physical changes overlook the complexity of what it means to inhabit a formerly violent city.

Notable Quote:

"My interviewees felt that the city is not to be treated like a post-conflict tabula rasa, but there is a particular ethics of approaching the city and learning about its complexities before intervening."
—Dr. Shakirah Hudani, [23:46]

7. Hygiene, Greening, and Aesthetics as Policy

[25:53]

• State discourses of cleanliness (“isuku”) and urban greening are rooted in both colonial/postcolonial practices and concepts of national renewal.
• Public cleaning events (umuganda) carry layered meanings—ranging from civic virtue to echoes of violent coercion during the genocide.
• Surface aesthetics often hide the heavy, sometimes problematic, labor and sociopolitical work underpinning these projects.

8. Contestation and Pushback from Residents

[28:56]

• People contest master plans, especially around issues of forced expropriation and informal settlement demolition.
• Legal action (e.g., landowners suing for fair compensation) is one form of resistance.
• Residents voice the need for humane, gradual planning that reflects practicalities of daily life, not just “world-class” visions.
• The designation of “high risk” zones and surprise evictions leave residents feeling excluded and uncertain about their place in the city.

Notable Moment:

"Some of my interviewees told stories of coming home and seeing a large red X painted on their house... with the word 'toa', meaning remove in Swahili... They were clearly disconcerted and unhappy about these removals."
—Dr. Shakirah Hudani, [31:05]

9. Urban Peripheries and Beyond

[33:12]

• The book expands beyond Kigali to look at peri-urban districts like Bugesera and planned rural villages.
• These spaces are being rapidly transformed—partly as local bureaucrats compete to be “the next Kigali.”
• The urban-rural divide is being re-negotiated, with issues of access, land speculation, and layered histories of trauma, exile, and ambition all at play.

Notable Insight:

"Political futurity in Rwanda today is very much tied up with how the state imagines and projects the space of the city. But it is not just an urban question in a narrow sense."
—Dr. Shakirah Hudani, [36:35]

10. Future Directions and Closing Thoughts

[37:16]

• Dr. Hudani is turning her research focus to Nairobi and urban change in Kenya, but continues to explore repair, transformation, and minor acts as themes.
• She notes a wave of renewed scholarship on African cities, viewing it as a generative space for new epistemologies and collaborations.

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "The master plan... as a metaphor for ordering space and populations over time." — Hudani, [12:38]
• "Minor acts offer us salient ways to reimagine relationality through repair." — Hudani, [15:43]
• "Not all these memories are easy memories... But they help long-term residents to see through the facades..." — Hudani, [18:47]
• "City not to be treated like a post-conflict tabula rasa, but with ethics and care..." — Hudani, [23:46]
• "Disconcerted and unhappy about these removals and the politics of uncertainty..." — Hudani, [31:05]
• "Political futurity in Rwanda is... tied up with how the state imagines and projects the space of the city." — Hudani, [36:35]

Structure & Flow

• The episode begins with the author’s academic and personal motivations, then moves through the major themes and arguments of the book.
• Discussion flows from high-level state planning, to local lived experiences, to examples of contestation, and finally to questions about periphery and future research.
• Throughout, both host and guest maintain an engaged, analytic tone, with Hudani offering in-depth, reflective insights anchored in fieldwork and theory.

Takeaways

• Master plans in Rwanda are powerful tools for spatial and narrative control, but are contested at many levels by residents with their own memories, claims, and practices.
• Social repair is anchored in material and ordinary acts as much as in grand state visions—a dynamic that is crucial in the post-genocide context.
• The struggle over Kigali and other urban spaces is not just about physical transformation, but about who gets to narrate and inhabit the future of Rwanda.

For more, see Dr. Shakirah E. Hudani’s Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (University of Chicago Press, 2024).