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 of preventing the cities’ collapse by (re)thinking about their urban future. Kigali - the capital city of Rwanda, reacted first in 2008 with the adoption of a Masterplan recently revised and approved in 2020. Nonetheless, the core aim of the Kigali City Masterplan is the transition to a sustainable satellite city composed of green settlements. The purpose of the paper is to examine the response to address the issues raised by the 11th SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) entitled “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, launching over the time a series of new settlements’ projects: Kigali 2020, Kigali Vision and Green City Kigali. The paper explored the building typologies embedded in the two Gacuriro Satellite projects, Kigali 2020 and Kigali Vision, pointing the analysis to the twin houses and the apartments’ buildings as quintessential cases to demonstrate that in order to pave the future there is a need to study the past understanding of their impact on the next urban evolution with a special regard on the private and public spatial quality. Moreover, it studied the use of a well-known urban development plan, the satellite city in the East African Region combined with the needs of “making cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”, in a specific built and unbuilt context where tradition and modernity have to find the way to establish an architectural dialogue. Therefore, the paper explores the three case studies through a comparative method and concludes recommendations for correcting approaches to reach the vision of Kigali as a sustainable city.