Abstract: In Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, the government and its partners turned to architecture and planning to build peace. These projects are case studies in liberal peace orthodoxy, which has increasingly called on development to do the work of sociopolitical, physical, and economic repair. Ethnographic research in one “model village” in northwestern Rwanda reveals both the challenges faced by residents and how particular socio-spatial contexts shape relationships between citizens and state after the genocide. There, relocated residents enact strategies to render themselves “ordinary”: dutiful citizens that endorse state development policies and wish not to attract unfavorable attention from the government. This ordinariness is, in one sense, reproduced as placelessness—a sameness that derives from the settlement’s uniform design and technocratic administration. This is also a placelessness that shuns relationships between ethnic identity and region. Residents’ construction of ordinariness arises from an interest in negative rights: the right to be left alone, to not be implicated in the region’s history of political extremism, and to participate equally in national development objectives. It is actively constructed by compensating those who died during the genocide and positioning residents as model citizens willing to apologize and recompense for the wrongs of others. Doing so seeks to demonstrate that residents are worthy of urbanization and development benefits. The village reveals a case in which citizenship is not only defined by building and living in Rwanda’s model villages. To be a model citizen here is to assume the burden of government expectations and narrative of a region, and to attempt to repair that image through accord and labor in service of model village construction.

Biography: Delia Duong Ba Wendel is an Assistant Professor at M.I.T.’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Her research explores how communities recover and rebuild after conflict. An interdisciplinary perspective that builds from training in Urban Planning, Cultural Geography, Architectural History, and Anthropology shapes her approach. Delia is currently working on two book projects that draw from historical and ethnographic research in central Africa. The first, Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, focuses on the production of a visual and material memory of mass violence that was propelled by both state interests and human rights practice. The second book, The Ethics of Stability, explores the Rwandan government’s approach to building peace through architecture and planning and the related challenges that residents face.

Delia received a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Harvard University in 2016. Her dissertation was recognized with grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Harvard Center for Ethics, and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. She also holds degrees in Architecture (BArch, Rice University), Cultural Geography (MSc, University College London) and Architectural History and Theory (MDes, Harvard GSD).