AN ARCHITECTURE OF EASEMENTS:
Transecting the Land of a Thousand Hills





My 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 Rwanda 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.

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.

This PhD received the Frederick Bonnart Scholarship at the Bartlett School of Architecture, which supports research on combating racial, religious, and cultural intolerance.




SUPERVISORS Dr Yeoryia Manolopolou
Professor of Architecture and Experimental Practice
The Bartlett School of Architecture

Dr Jerome Lewis
Reader in Social Anthropology
University College London

EXAMINERSProfessor Lindsay Bremner 
Professor of Architecture and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange
School of Architecture + Cities
University of Westminster

Professor Camilo Boano
Professor of Urban Design & Critical Theory
Development Planning Unit
Faculty of the Built Environment