In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired U.S. and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The results were promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. To make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed, its residents converted into consumer markets for green housing and service delivery systems.

Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city's popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism.