Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-genocide Rwanda
My first book was published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2024, and examines planning, place, and the politics of repair in post-genocide Rwanda.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo212888006.html
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Winner of the 2025 International Studies Association (ISA) Peace Section Global South Scholar Book Award.
Chapter Descriptions. pdf.
Interview with UNC's 'Bookmark this!'
11 Books about urban Africa from 2024
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Blurbs and Reviews
Book review in Society and Space (Zachary Levenson, Nov 2024):
“Master Plans & Minor Acts is a crucial contribution to the literature on African urbanism, postconflict state projects, and more generally, to the sociology of planning. Hudani’s phenomenological approach to repair is a really useful intervention in that burgeoning literature, one that rearticulates repair not as something to be cooked up from a position of exteriority, but as something that already exists to be cultivated.”
Book review in IJURR (Nicole Lanphier, Jan 2025):
“Sitting at the crossroads of sociology and urban planning scholarship, Master Plans and Minor Acts by Shakirah E. Hudani is a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of social and technical planning processes and mechanisms that have shaped and continue to inform the spatiality of post-genocide Rwanda. Hudani deftly weaves together seemingly disparate elements of quotidian life and state urban planning processes in and around Kigali to articulate a holistic understanding of the nature of repair and conciliation that is taking place.”
Book review in Dialogues in Human Geography (David Mwambari, Jan 2025)
Review essay in African Studies Review (Jeffrey Paller, March 2025)
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“Master Plans and Minor Acts offers a compelling account of the relations between the material character of the city, state power, and the tasks of inhabiting the present” — Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley.
"Contemporary Kigali and Rwanda are often presented as gleaming models for a fantastic new urban Africa. This book provides a rigorous, well-researched and cautious set of caveats to the mythmaking, leaving the reader with a nuanced understanding of urban development in post-genocide Rwanda, the oft-claimed “Singapore of Africa.” The “minor acts” of the book are the small scale, alternative means of building urban community that run counter to the state’s fancy master plans and their near-constant dispossession - and this is where Rwanda’s real peacebuilding and reparative justice can take place." — Garth Myers, Trinity College.
“Shakirah E. Hudani’s Master Plans and Minor Acts offers an impressive analysis of urban transformations in post-genocide Kigali and its surrounds. Looking beyond and below statist and transnationally financed capitalist infrastructural projects, Hudani proposes a “material politics of repair” for uncovering place-based and people-based reimagining of the palimpsestic city to reckon with the past, rebuild in the present, and reconstitute an ethical future. The “minor acts” of Hudani’s book contain the seed of sustainable urban dwelling in the aftermath of violence.” — Cajetan Iheka, Yale University.
"In this outstanding new book, Shakirah Hudani shows how the Rwandan state imposed a vision of post-conflict nationhood through urban planning – materially erasing and replacing memory with an engineered vision of neat social ordering. In the interstices of such violent forms of urban dispossession, Hudani finds “minor acts” of interpersonal conciliation and cooperation that offer limited, but necessary forms of repair amid the irreparable loss of the genocide. Beautifully written, and carefully argued Master Plans and Minor Acts is a major contribution to urban studies, African Studies, and post-conflict studies." — Julie Livingston, New York University.
