Hudani SE (2024) Master Plans & Minor Acts: Repairingthe City in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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aul, a long-term resident of the capital city of Kigali, remained skeptical of the Rwandan state project of urban transformation in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. He was talking to the planner and theorist Shakirah Hudani, who recounts the exchange in her new book. They were discussing isuku, or “cleanliness,” but with a connotation of state-produced hygiene. It mapped onto a certain aesthetic, which represented “the conversion of unruly nature and disorderly pollution into spaces of order and regularity” (73) – a practice central to the postconflict project of national reconstruction.

“When someone says I’m going to transform,” Paul told her, “what do you want to transform? Who are you to transform? What is a durable transformation?...The genocidal project [was] a transformation project in a bad way….So was the colonial project. So, when we talk about a transformation, we must be careful. We need to understand and deconstruct it properly” (92).

And indeed, Hudani’s book, Master Plans & Minor Acts, is all about capturing ambivalence toward transformation. “Top-down state planning,” she argues, “erases, defamiliarizes, and depoliticizes…local claims to place” (186). Hudani describes this mode of intervention as master plans, which she defines “as state forms of reordering and reorganization in mnemonic, social, and spatial terms” (6). The problem is that even if these plans are intended as a means of national reconstruction in a postconflict context – the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide – they stamp out “heterogeneous ways of life and diverse forms of belonging in the capital” (103). As in the book’s title, master plans are counterposed to minor acts, which are “a form of transitional repair aimed at reintegration and the reconstruction of the quotidian” (188). In other words, these minor acts are proposed as a flexible alternative to high-modernist planning, something far less rigid than state-directed projects. They are ultimately a “concrete ethics for rebuilding the postconflict city” (194), a “heuristic” (198), a “pedagogy” (198). If master planning forcibly severs the present from the genocide – “Progress is thus seen as the distance traveled from…1994” (55) – it does so through practices of erasure, of forgetting, and of de-ethnicization and the construction of a novel national(ist) subject. Minor acts are a form of agency (69) that enable residents to not only plan for themselves, but to hold onto their memories, developing them into an “ethical praxis of care and continuity that contrasts with the ordered aesthetic of the master plan, an ideology of erasure that has besieged the capital” (49).

I am not usually in the habit of peppering my reviews with so many direct quotations, but let me begin by noting just how beautifully this book is written. It is also an important intervention in urban theory for a number of reasons. First, the concept of “repair” has proliferated wildly since the pandemic, and “urban repair” in particular has suddenly become an obligatory theoretical idiom in geography and urban studies circles. But the term is far too often romanticized, or else treated at such a high level of abstraction that I have not found it particularly useful in my own thinking. But Hudani demonstrates the importance of theorizing repair – what she calls a “material politics of repair” – in relation to her case. This concept, she argues convincingly, enables us to spatialize a Levinasian ethics of the neighbor, in the aftermath of traumatic events ranging from mass killings to large-scale dispossession. It allows us to understand reconciliation in relation to the rebuilding of the city, articulated through material (and she literally means material here) practices of collective rebuilding and living-together.

This is the first important contribution of Hudani’s book. Second, she recenters the city in discussions of national reconstruction. I found this incredibly useful in relation to my own work, which concerns postapartheid cities in South Africa, and thinking about why it is that I focus on cities. Existing accounts of postconflict reconciliation projects tend to focus entirely on the national scale, the refashioning of national subjects, and so forth. But Hudani argues for the city as a (if not the) key site in which communities of collective memory are reproduced. “The city,” she insists, “condenses socio-material relations and posits shared national futures; it is a central space that conveys the stakes of national visioning and the materiality of the conciliation imperative to people living together in close proximity” (3). It is, by necessity, a limit case – not only the condensation of social relations, as she suggests, but their concentration.

Third, the book subtly advocates for a reframing of African urbanism in terms of postconflict planning. Hudani argues that prevailing accounts of African urban transformation “largely elide a postconflict focus” (195). Large-scale planning – or “master plans” in the author’s formulation – is understood to be a remedial practice of sorts, but a necessarily fraught one. Instead of uncritically analyzing the production of a “postconflict” national identity, Hudani focuses on planning’s destructive moments: the nationalist erasure of ethnicity (57), the evisceration of politics (8), the purging of memory (100), the forced removal of informal settlements (107-110), the foreclosure of urban citizenship (115), and above all, the erasure of local claims to place (186).

This paradox, as I read Hudani’s complex argument, is at the heart of the book’s thesis, drawing on all three of these themes: repair, the urban, postconflict. Master planning is a state-led attempt to repair the nation in the aftermath of genocide by intervening in the urban landscape. But this top-down mode of intervention destroys more than it produces, attempting to foist manufactured memories onto populations, obliterating “organic remembrance” (3) in the process. Hudani sees minor acts as an alternative and the true site in which repair plays out, despite being in constant tension with master planning. I wondered when reading the book whether this contrast is not drawn a bit too starkly, à la James Scott, with planning defined from the outset as the enemy, and local autonomy lionized as necessarily desirable. What if the choices she poses are too stark? First, this framing runs the risk of romanticizing the local, which can sometimes assume openly reactionary forms. The local is not inherently desirable, purified of relations of domination. It is the relations that are constituted at this scale that are of consequence for the analysis. And second, Hudani raises the question of scalability: how would a planning that did take account of minor acts look? Is no synthesis possible, a mode of master planning articulated to already existing minor acts? I also worry that self-provisioning, with all of the valorization of flexibility that it entails, can end up representing survivalism as resistance, venerating agency as an end in itself. I therefore continue to wonder about master plans and minor acts as necessarily antithetical terms rather than as component parts of an integral approach to planning.

This minor qualm aside, 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. Likewise, her understanding of repair as a material politics offers us a way forward for understanding the relationship between everyday life in the city and its built form. Planning interventions into the latter are always concurrently interventions into the former. What she calls “postconflict social engineering” (28) is always simultaneously a social intervention and the real, material re-engineering of cities. State-building as a project is inscribed in the very fabric of the city, simultaneously biopolitical and material. But Hudani goes far beyond existing biopolitical accounts that focus entirely on the production of subjectivity. In this book, she trains her lens on planning’s negativity, with all of the erasure, destruction, and dispossession it entails.

Zachary Levenson (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida International University and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press, 2022) and the co-editor of The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism (Routledge, 2024).

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