O’ Dochartaigh, Kilian;
(2023)
An Architecture of Easements: Transecting the Land of a Thousand Hills.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills, is the smallest and most populated country in sub-Saharan Africa. With 80% of Rwandans dependent upon land, it is also the least urbanized country in the region. In 2007, the Rwandan government launched the post-genocide Vision 2020 to transition society away from an informal, traditional and subsistence use of land into formally planned, ‘modern’ settlements. Committed to a Western, urbanized, middle-class model of society, Vision 2020 severs people from the land, overlooking the longue durée of colonial land-based conflict and entangled socio-ecological realities on the ground. This practice-based PhD uses the transect — a section drawn across the earth’s surface along which observations and actions are made — to survey how the architecture of Vision 2020 segregates people from nature. Weaving anthropology, political ecology, and geography with architectural drawing, making and fieldwalking, I critique any attempt at segregating communities, particularly following former discriminatory, colonial, and ethnic lines. Through developing a range of transectional inquiries and design techniques in collaboration with Rwanda’s indigenous forest communities, we collectively speculate upon alternative shared, multi-species and inclusive futures for Rwanda. Following the lives of a resettled indigenous Twa community, this thesis uncovers their lived knowledge of immersive dwelling within the forests while facing forced displacement and resettlement. Peripatetic dialogues with the Twa exhume deep-rooted questions about architecture’s troubled relationship with land. An intense socio-ecological intelligence that constitutes a vernacular home is unearthed that strives to ease planetary visions to urbanize the non-Western world. In this thesis, the transect emerges as a site of knowledge and a method for creating egalitarian, spatial, political, and ecological propositions for an architecture of easements. The transect is a transdisciplinary model of practising architecture with historical, geographical, and political depth that can aid practitioners in navigating borders of racial and cultural difference.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | An Architecture of Easements: Transecting the Land of a Thousand Hills |
| Language: | English |
| Keywords: | Architecture, Rwanda, Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology, Post-conflict, Postcolonial, Indigenous |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10184251 |
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