Building the Future Urban Structure: Kigali’s Green City Project

In the last decades, Africa’s rapid urbanisation rate and growing metropolises have attracted the attention of urban studies, pointing to the need to prevent the cities’ collapse (re)thinking about their urban future. Kigali - the capital city of Rwanda, reacted first in 2008 by adopting a master plan recently revised and approved in 2020. Nonetheless, the Kigali City Master Plan's core aim is to transition to a sustainable satellite city composed of green settlements. The purpose of this research is to examine the response to address the issues raised by the 11th SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) - titled “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, launching over time a series of new settlements’ projects: Kigali 2020, Kigali Vision and Green City Kigali. It studies the use of a well-known urban development plan. This satellite city must match with the goal of “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” in a specific built and unbuilt context where tradition and modernity have to find a way to establish an architectural dialogue. Therefore, the paper explores the three case studies through a comparative method and concludes by providing advice for a correct approach to the vision of Kigali as a sustainable city.