CreSP

RETHINKING PUBLIC SPACES IN KIGALI
Every city and community has its own public spaces, sometimes they are not planned or design, and they are the result of the spontaneous doing of people. These spaces often identify with the streets, with small open spaces at the corners of road junctions, with pockets of greenery among the buildings, or with the yard or lawn of a representative building, such as the church, the city hall and the school.
If they are planned and well designed, public spaces can contribute to the environmental and socio-spatial qualities of the city, to the wellbeing of citizens and visitors, and have positive spinoffs to the security, local economy, community engagement, and vibrancy of the urban space.
In the implementation of the Local District Plans, the Kigali One Stop Centre of has teamed up with the School of Architecture of the University of Rwanda in order to provide Kigali with well designed public spaces. For creating successful spaces, it is essential to respond to the needs of the residents and visitors, balancing the widest range of interests and lifestyles. It is important that these places are accessible to everyone without restrictions, are used daily, provide comfort, safety and visual pleasure for welcoming people and allow them to carry out a wide range of recreating activities.
Since last year, students, lecturers and researchers of the School of Architecture have been engaged in a number of important initiatives related to public spaces. During the 2014-15 academic year the former Senior Lecturer Dr Ilaria Boniburini led an architectural design course and an industrial attachment program on mapping and re-thinking public spaces in Kigali. They involved the fourth year architecture students, international scholars and students, artists, Un-Habitat experts and Enan Habiyambere, architect at the Kigali One Stop Centre, who closely followed up the progress of these experiences. The results of this work provided the basic knowledge and inputs for starting a collaborative work between the School and the City of Kigali. Following the signing of MoU between the College of Science and Technology (CST) and the City of Kigali-One Stop centre, in June a team of six people was formed to support the One Stop Centre in designing public spaces in Kigali. Four architecture students are part of this team: Symphorien Gasana, Irene Izere, Eric Kaiyjuka Mutabazi and Renzaho Youssouf. They are supervised by Anna Breda, architect and former officer of the City of Kigali and coordinated by Dr Boniburini, on behalf of the School of Architecture.

The ability to transform a city depends on the willingness of the officials to collaborate with professionals, students and the communities. It is a form of participatory design process that requires design teams that works on various projects that have a physical and social impact in the city to have an awareness of the primary beneficiaries of the projects, the primary targets of the projects. Any change that takes place in the city is a change that impacts people's lives, hence we need to have designers that profoundly understands that the city is for the people.