History of Kigali as Satellite City in the Tropical Africa

In the last decades, Africa’s rapid urbanisation rate and growing metropolises have attracted the attention of urban studies pointing the need of preventing the cities’ collapse (re)thinking 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 cored aim of the Kigali City Masterplan is the transition to a sustainable satellite city composed by green settlements. The purpose of the paper is to examine the response to address the issues raised by the 11th SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) - titled “Sustainable Cities and Communities”, launching over the time a series of new settlements’ projects: Kigali 2020, Kigali Vision and Green City Kigali. It is studied the use of a well-known urban development plan, the satellite city in the East African Region combined with the needs of “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” - as stated by United Nation (2019), in a specific built and unbuilt context where tradition and modernity have to find the way to establish an architectural dialogue. The three case studies are explored through a comparative method that confronts the heteronomy of different compositional approaches in designing the overall masterplan of the settlements and the adopted housing typologies. According to the climatic and morphologic context of Rwanda both the settlements and the buildings have to comply with a very peculiar genius locus mostly related to the tropical architecture. The tropical architecture is usually associated with the modernist architecture in Africa that spread first in the British colonies, especially on West Africa and subsequently it developed in other countries of the continent. The research concludes providing advises for a correct approach to the vision of Kigali as sustainable city reshaping the city as a tropical polycentric artifact.