In 1994, a genocide decimated Rwanda and destroyed many existing socio-economic and political structures; it was a devastation so pronounced that many scholars have interpreted its results as a tabula rasa. However, the Rwandan genocide actually left behind a vast field of debris including human remains, damaged buildings, and empty homes. Rather than erase these remnants of the time before it came to power, the Rwandan state has deliberately sought to preserve and presence some of this debris for its own political legitimation. Furthermore, the state has developed museums and heritage sites to solidify a common understanding of Rwanda’s history that validates the control of the incumbent party. But at the same time that it looks backward to rewrite history, the state also looks forward to the future. New construction conveys an image of modernization and progress through architectural symbols of modernity including the use of materials such as concrete, glass, and steel, as well as forms and styles based on international precedents. These architectural symbols help to produce a national imaginary of Rwanda as a “modern” nation and enable the Rwandan state to claim legitimacy based on narratives about national progress.

Today, Rwanda is broadly considered an African success story offering an alternative model for modernization in the global South. Most studies of Rwandan development have focused on economic strategies, but have not examined the state’s strategic use of historic sites and the contemporary built environment to both sustain and subvert a timeline of past, present, and future. This dissertation argues that the Rwandan state has used historic preservation and modern architecture to stage modernity in a way that seems to adhere to global expectations of linear progress, but in fact dissolves the boundaries of past and present, or tradition and modernity, in ways that are specific to both the state’s and country’s needs. And in this manner, Rwanda can be a model for developing countries in today’s world.

As I will explore in this dissertation, the Rwandan state performs a linear progress that is largely based on Western notions of developmentalism. State rhetoric focuses on modern-ization as an ongoing process, and development plans are couched in the language of “visions” for the future. In this way, the state keeps modernity as a telos in order to instill hope in a formerly-devastated population. The affirmation of modernity as a future stage to be reached is also a way to claim the potential for parity with fully developed nations, even if it has not yet been achieved. Multiple examples of the performance of linear progress will be explored in this dissertation, including the representation of precolonial culture as a distant past; the sequestering of traditional materials into museum spaces; the construction of modern-looking architecture; and the adherence to international genocide commemoration norms. These are all ways in which Rwanda seems to adhere to the construct of a linear time in which the past must be surpassed in order to move toward the future. In this way, Rwanda performs modernization.

However, the Rwandan state also disrupts the construct of the linear timeline in two ways. The first is the temporal palimpsest, or the layering of multiple times in built space, so that past, present, and future are mingled and not necessarily distinguishable. This includes the selective preservation of remnants of the past, as well as the renovation of historic sites without clear indication of new materials. These historiographical manipulations allow Rwanda’s present-day elites to mold history in their own interests. The second form of disruption is the dissolution of the binary of tradition and modernity by disproving that one always comes before the other, and by expanding the agency of who is “modern.” In other words, Rwanda disrupts the association of tradition with “before” and African, and the association of modernity with “after” and Western. As subsequent chapters will show, there is evidence in Rwanda’s built environment that notions of modernity have been shaped by various internal and external agents, and are not just a legacy of colonial or Western influence. The Rwandan state has also explicitly declared that as it builds a path toward a better and more “modern” future, it will draw on its own traditions.

Through a nuanced balancing of historiographical and chronological manipulation with the performance of progress, Rwanda seems to propose a new model for modernization which can lead to developmental success. However, this model is dependent on a lot of staging and a high degree of control. Beneath the veneer of success, there are concerns that a model which is predicated on authoritarian power and risky speculation could lead to a downturn, or worse – a return of ethnic violence. This dissertation will examine the benefits and potential pitfalls of the Rwandan model.

This dissertation is a study of the modern Buddhist art and architecture of India. It focuses on the aesthetics and architectural practices that developed as a result of the intersection of Buddhism and various nationalist movements in India over the course of the twentieth century. More than an incidental aspect of India’s development, Buddhism was central to crafting key narratives around Indian modernity and national identity. Architecture became an important index of that process, defining a longer history of Buddhism in the region and generating spaces in which to imagine and realize new social, political, and religious conceptions of India.

Chapter 1 attends to the development of modern Buddhist art and architecture within the context of an emerging Hindu nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. It begins with Mahatma Gandhi’s entrance into a new Hindu temple complex in New Delhi, looking at how Buddhism was reimagined within a more inclusive understanding of Hindu culture as the Arya Dharma. The chapter focuses on how Buddhism was expressed as part of a Hindu revivalist aesthetic championed by the architect Sris Chandra Chatterjee. Developed as a network of institutions, pilgrimage centers, and temples across India, the public of these projects was similarly novel, working to construct an image of the subcontinent as “all-India,” and framing Buddhism as part of a modern religious commons defined by the confluence of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Chapter 2 focuses on Buddhist art and architecture constructed after India’s independence in 1947. Under the direction of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Buddhism informed several national and international policies, guiding the creation of projects that sought to position India as a global hub for international understanding and peace. Rather than one unified style, the modern Buddhist art and architecture of this period is typified by a variety of approaches. Projects include a Japanese-funded monument for world peace, a memorial to the seventh century traveler Xuanzang in Nalanda, and the work of artist-architect Upendra Maharathi. Each project embodies an understanding of Buddhism as an antidote to imperialism and an embedded aspect of Indian culture, setting the stage for later developments in modern Buddhist art and architecture as a response to social and political issues, especially caste.

Chapter 3 marks a break from earlier approaches to modern Buddhism in India. The mass conversion to Buddhism led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in 1956 resulted in a new Buddhist tradition known as Dalit Buddhism or Navayana Buddhism. The art and architecture associated with the movement developed to express its religious and social ideals, fusing historical references with modern forms that celebrated Dalit Buddhism as an escape from the Hindu caste system. By contextualizing the aesthetic trends and developments of the Dalit Buddhist movement within the social and political ambitions of Ambedkar and the Dalit Buddhist movement, it is possible to see how ancient Buddhist architectural precedents and later nationalist approaches to Buddhism were coopted to create modern spaces that celebrated the social, religious, and political emancipation of Dalits in India.

In the wake of the 1989 historical turn, the Second World’s new societies entered a new globalized world amid complex economic advancements. Within the remarkable transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist experience emerged as a question of the modern and modernity. According to its many critics, communism, which this study perceives as one form of modernity among other modernities, sets itself apart by its purported failure. This dissertation departs from the early post-socialist years’ failure mantra and attempts to reveal a more nuanced understanding of the communist world. To do so, this dissertation looks into the very ambitious project of urban development within which the housing program played a fundamental part. For the students of the Second World, it is almost common knowledge to think of Eastern Europe’s housing development as a fundamental part of spatial and societal transformation. As is the case with most former Soviet Bloc countries, housing development played a crucial role in shaping a new society envisioned by the communist ambition for economic and social advancement. From a low economic starting point, the Romanian post-war experience embarked on a fast-paced industrialization project that asked for a transformation of architectural design that accommodates standardization and prefabrication. What became a rigid design and construction system by way of heavy industry and the primacy of the economic efficiency was disrupted by a humanizing wave of spatial and “informal” transformations. Disrupting the spatial standardization of the socialist housing units was just one aspect of what I call the politics of housing occupancy. Within the workings of the housing project, the inhabitants’ capacity for adaptability, transformation, negotiation, and interventionist participation led to a work of what was called ‘system optimization,’ as the technocratic state bureaucracy appropriated the inhabitants’ spatial interventions. In this study, I explore the ways problematic forms of standardization and the lack of variety in spatial planning contributed substantially to the trend of housing “personalization.” Within the emerging project of housing development, carried at the scale of the entire country, I propose here that the socialist housing project allowed for a relational interconnection between the population living in standardized apartments, architects, and the state. This relationality was only possible through the interdisciplinarity of state design institutions. The collaborative expertise of people brought together from different disciplines was inclusive of residents’ transformative spatial practices in ways that contributed to improvements in the quality of housing units towards the end of the socialist period. My research builds upon and challenges several general assumptions that govern the Romanian and international body of literature concerning the Communist state. On the one hand, during the socialist period, the Romanian authoritarian state-controlled its citizens at every level of their everyday lives. The main criticism of communism is concerned with the fact that the state exercised a totalizing control over the population through the state police as its sole means of maintaining power. Further, many accounts assert that the Communist state denied citizens privacy by confining them to spaces denying their rights. Additionally, the well-established post-socialist criticism assimilated every spatial transgression to resistance and dissent discourse. I argue here that residents’ different ways of dwelling, domestic practices, and their spatial appropriations, needs, and aspirations, revealed in their ways of living in the conventionally designed state apartments, were recovered by sociological research and re-inscribed in the practice of architecture. Architects and sociologists alike problematized residents’ actions and reactions, as recounted in retrospect years later, and inscribed them within arenas of technocratic expertise. Sociological considerations about residents’ spatial agency became embedded in architectural design, which was only possible through the interdisciplinary character of the state architecture and construction institutions in charge of housing design and construction. In recent years, many scholarly works have explored everyday life during the socialist years in the former Soviet bloc countries. According to this scholarly interest, this dissertation explores the socialist housing project through archival documents of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, archived interdisciplinary research projects produced within state design and construction institutions, discussions with residents, and analysis of projects from the only architecture magazine published at the time. In conclusion, the ‘socialist modern’ of the 60s and 70s aspired to comfort as a fundamental part of the communist vision of tomorrow. Wrapped within the ambivalent and all-encompassing notion of comfort, the theoretical articulation for housing betterment was frequently used to justify and support decisions on the different trajectories of the socialist housing project. The notion of comfort, albeit useful and malleable in its higher purpose, was, at times, just a propagandistic expression of the traditional/modern dichotomy built upon ambitions of a much-awaited and prosperous communist future.

"Disrupting Environments" explores how boarding school domesticity was a central tool to instill Catholic and Socialist values in two twenty-century Latin American nations. In Colombia, an elementary boarding school for indigenous children that operated between 1913 and 1958 in La Guajira region was the most influential component of a project of Christianization and “Colombianization” of the Wayúu indigenous group. Founded by the Catholic Capuchin order with funding from the Colombian government, the boarding school was set to be the center of a new town meant to facilitate missionaries’ control of the indigenous territory. In Cuba, a program of rural boarding schools for middle-school students that operated between 1971 and the early 1990s was intended to shape the "hombre nuevo" (new man) for the emerging Socialist society. Hundreds of these boarding schools were built in rural areas across Cuba as part of the government’s push to upgrade the countryside’s physical conditions. This dissertation shows how the social transformation campaigns in both Colombia and Cuba relied heavily on the built environment and used boarding schools as their catalyst elements. I contend that the Capuchin order and the Cuban government used their power to produce physical interventions while simultaneously spreading narratives prescribing how to interpret these interventions. Such narratives shaped the boarding schools’ domesticities, situating them as part of larger coherent landscapes (physical and rhetorical), making it difficult for students to contest the values they were set to learn. The two ideologies promoted in both campaigns, Catholicism and Socialism, were carefully spatialized and domesticated to change children’s lives through quotidian activities. "Disrupting Environments," therefore, understands boarding schools as domestic spaces. It claims that the academic activities performed in these institutions are secondary to their domestic use. It also shows that readings of domesticity require the analysis of the narratives that shape it, which circulate beyond the traditionally understood boundaries of domestic space.

This dissertation explores the spatial manifestation of fear and fun in the urban public and private spaces of Tehran in the postwar era. From a comparative and historical perspective, the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution shifted the secular authority of the Pahlavi Monarchy (1925-1979) to the conservative government of the Islamic Republic. While the former regime engaged in practices to form a modern secular nation-state, the latter sought to institutionalize religion. This shift deeply affected the social life of the Iranian people, particularly young men and women. Modern conceptions of leisure, recreation, entertainment and freedom in public urban spaces were also challenged.

This study investigates the ways in which the rise of leisure spaces in Tehran has resulted in the production of zones of exception and encounter. A conditional and temporal understanding of public joy and freedom is produced and reproduced within everyday ‘norms and forms’ in the context of the Islamic Republic. In addition, the notion of agency has led to the production of a new identity and lifestyle that stands in stark contrast with the current ruling authority.

The research examines three case studies, including the spaces of women-exclusive parks constructed by the Tehran Municipality, public streets employed for the exhibition of luxury cars and specific social performances by the young and rich, and suburban garden-villas as spaces for clandestine parties. The study explores emerging lifestyles of a young generation of Tehrani residents born after the Revolution, who advanced to maturity under conservative regulations and codes of public behavior. It looks at how these conditions have affected their lives and social relations in a variety of dimensions, and how these young men and women have formulated a particular everyday urban lifestyle of resistance. Youth have created ways of manipulating controlled urban environments to redefine ‘public freedom’. Through the manufacture of fun in the city, they compensate for a lack of public and private leisure space.

The research is conducted by ethnographic fieldwork, and includes on-site observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations. The dissertation provides an analysis of the ongoing interactions among young Iranians at the selected sites, and how their everyday practices in the built environment have served as methods of resistance to political and social restrictions, particularly those that limit their use and enjoyment of public space. Challenges to everyday dynamics of ‘resistance’ and ‘agency’ are shaping a new ‘culture of imposture’, a tradition that deviates from the moral values of post-revolutionary Islamic society.

The research also revealed a number of compelling observations about the everyday use of public and private urban spaces in the Middle Eastern context, and allude to spatial strategies of defiance against rules of public behavior under totalitarian governments. As the general trajectory of research in the areas of gender, class, and sexuality rapidly develops in the United States, this research brings a Middle Eastern perspective to a widening, international discourse.