‘This city is not for me’—farmers’ differentiated experiences of, and responses to, reorganisation of urban marshlands in Kigali

In the context of Kigali’s “green” urban transformation, this paper examines the socially differentiated implications for urban farmers of the reorganization of urban cultivated marshlands. Based on qualitative fieldwork analysed through an intersectional feminist political ecology lens, the study shows how marshland reorganization and closure reproduce farmers’ vulnerabilities that are shaped by intersecting axes of gender, age, health/ability and education. It demonstrates a largely exclusionary pattern of the city’s urban greening agenda that is at odds with authorities’ ambitions for the opposite. Nevertheless, some of the farmers’ responses to the changes, shaped by social difference and emotional and relational attachments to marshland spaces, subtly negotiate authorities’ representation of urban marshland farming as an encroaching threat to urban sustainable development.

To move towards inclusivity, the paper suggests urban policy in Kigali to foreground the heterogeneous positions and vulnerabilities of farmers affected and to engage an emancipatory agenda that challenges the unequal relations and responsibilities that underpin these. The paper also discusses the possibilities for a re-imagination of urban agriculture as instead integrated in and conducive to a socially, environmentally and economically just and resilient urban transformation. This study, one of the few to interrogate Kigali’s development trajectory from the vantage point of the city’s many farmers, sheds much-needed light on urban agriculture in Rwanda and highlights the significance of expanding intersectional analyses of urban socio-ecological development and change in Kigali and beyond.