Towards a sustainable urban development: the satellite city project of Kigali, Rwanda

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. The main objective of the Kigali City Masterplan is the transition to a sustainable satellite city composed by green settlements introducing at the same time a flexible zoning plan, boosting the mixed use structure in the CBD and supporting the green growth. The purpose of the paper is to examine the response given by an African City to address the issues raised by the 11th SDGs (Standard Development Goals) - titled "Sustainable Cities and Communities", through the vision of the city as a project. 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 in 2019, in a specific built and unbuilt context where tradition and modernity have to find the way to establish an architectural dialogue. The paper explores case studies of polycentric plans proposed over time in the Region and retrieved from the overall Kigali Master Plan two settlements - namely Kigali 2020, Kigali Vision, analysing them through a comparative method. In conclusion the research provides an analysis on how the relationship city-architecture continues to play a founding role in shaping the urban development by adopting a precise model: the satellite city.