On December 6, 2024, from 10:00 am to 12:00, Center for Sub-Saharan African Studies of the Institute for International and Area Studies (IIAS) at Tsinghua University hosted the third lecture of the 2024-2025 autumn semester “‘Africa's Singapore’: Experimental urbanism in Kigali”. The lecture was held both online and offline and was delivered by Dr. Allen Xiao, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The event was moderated by Ms. Zhang Shuibei, a PhD Candidate at the Institute for International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University.
About 50 people attended the lecture, including IIAS faculty members and doctoral students, scholars and students from both home and abroad, and others interested in the topic.
Looking back on the whole lecture, Dr. Xiao first introduced the differences between Singapore and Rwanda in terms of size, population and level of development, and then discussed the implication behind the discourse that describes Rwanda as the Singapore of Africa. Dr. Xiao then mentioned the global impact of Singapore as a development model and the discussion of urban development models reflected behind this discourse.
In the second part of the lecture, Dr. Xiao focused on the academic significance in studying this case. He emphasized the spatial and temporal dimensions of the geographies of imaginaries and the importance of scale in geographic research. At the same time, he emphasized that Kigali's master plan and smart city building correspond to Kigali's vision of the future and the future construction scenarios that come with the institutionalization of this vision, respectively.
At the end of the lecture, Dr. Xiao pointed out that despite not being a city-state like Singapore, we argue, Kigali’s smart-city building is based on a national-urban scalar nexus, through which centralization and coordination are called for being institutionalized in alignment with the Master Plan. Although “smart city” is a global discourse used in the Master Plan, we argue that Kigali’s smart-city building practices reflect its regional aspiration, instead of a global one. In essence, it is not a repetition of the Singaporean development model, but rather a building and dissemination of their model of urban development on their own. This imported urban model is a self-writing, self-orchestrating process in Rwanda, an African country that has used the script of a successful Asian model to write its own story, and overall a power-centered process.
During the Q&A session at the end of the lecture, Dr. Xiao engaged in a lively discussion with teachers and students of IIAS as well as other online and offline participants on the Rwandan people's perception of and feedback on the Singaporean model, the Rwandan government's political aspirations in applying this type of development discourse, and the tensions in the process of visionary planning and policy implementation.
Allen Xiao, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he is a PhD supervisor with a focus on urban and cultural geography. He has long been based in Nigeria to study urban identity, mobility experiences, and youth subjectivities. Recently, he has expanded his research to Kenya and Rwanda on urban development.
