Flora, Fauna, & Flamboyance: Southern Sudan’s Municipal Fantasy

Photo Courtesy of Public Domain
Though most people have a favorite tasting animal, aside from an occasional fundamentalist vegetarian, the consensus is that animal crackers would not be nearly as good if they were shaped like a boring old ritz. Same thing goes for Teddy Grahams, Gummy Worms/Bears, Chocolate Moose, etc. This was the sort of philosophy behind Southern Sudan’s recently unveiled civic ambitions to remake its capital cities in the shapes found on some of their state flags.

 

“That's our thinking, it’s unique," Jemma Kumba, the Minister of Housing and Physical Planning of Southern Sudan, told the AP. Daniel Wani, Kumba’s undersecretary, elaborated on the grand civic vision. “Our plan is to create a nuclear city outside Juba…We call it, Rhino City.”

Preliminary designs call for the regional capital of Juba to be a metropolis in the shape of a rhinoceros, with a long boulevard for a neck the city of Wau will be a giraffe, and the town of Yambio has been drafted as a pineapple. It’s a $10 billion concept for a government that has had under $2 billion to work with for its entire 2010 budget, and for a people who live on less than a single U.S. dollar a day.

 

Outlandish municipal projects such as these are not unprecedented, though this is the first concept that draws upon animals and fruit for inspiration. In Argentina, city planners designed the city, Ciudad Evita, to look like the profile of the former president Juan Domingo Peron’s wife, Evita Peron. In 2006 Dubai completed its construction of three palm-shaped residential islands off its coast on the Arabian Gulf.

Photo Courtesy of NASA Satelite

Still in recovery from decades of civil war, Southern Sudan is in need of major development, reconstruction, and environmental protection. There is almost no plumbing and electricity, and no septic system, even in the densely populated cities.

 

Immediately following the peace agreement signed in January of 2005 by the Sudanese National Congress Party in the north and the People’s Liberation Movement in the south, putting an end to 22 years of civil war, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched a post conflict environmental assessment of Southern Sudan. Two and a half years later UNEP concluded in its 350 plus page report that, “Just as environmental degradation can contribute to the triggering and perpetuation of conflict,” Executive Director of UNEP Achim Steiner wrote, “the sustainable development of natural resources can provide the basis for long term stability, sustainable livelihoods, and development.”

 

Some of Sudan’s current environmental obstacles include waste and agricultural mismanagement, significant increases in livestock, water pollution, deforestation, and environmental oversights in new projects. UNEP is still in the process of implementing some of the 85 detailed recommendations made in the 2007 report. This past July they planted half a million trees around Juba. But Southern Sudan has more than its northern neighbors to be concerned with, as developed nations across the globe are vying for the chance to exploit their resources and are buying up precious plots of farmland.

 

Given the tenuous position of the region and its people, some have been critical of the Southern Sudanese Government’s vision for a cosmopolitan fusion of flora, fauna, and civic flamboyance, not to mention the persisting genocide and refugee crisis that continues to plague the north. "It doesn't seem like the [Government of Southern Sudan] should be using its resources or staff time when the people of Southern Sudan lack basic services like health care and water," Nora Petty, an aid worker in Juba told the AP.

 

But even if the Southern Sudanese Government’s dream of a future where the office of the regional President of Juba will be in the eye of a rhinoceros, or the site of a new sewage treatment plant in Wau will be underneath the tail of a giraffe, is nothing more than a fantasy, it is at the very least a possible reflection of an emerging optimism as Southern Sudan approaches its sixth year of peace and a possible declaration of its independence.  The images alone are powerful: The armored skin of the rhino that cannot be pierced; The clairvoyance of a giraffe which sees over all and ‘sticks its neck out’; And the pineapple whose fruit lies in wait for those resilient to its ominous exterior.

Photo: Dmitri Markine (www.dmitrimarkine.com)