The master plan focuses on the rapid urban growth in Kigali, Rwanda and responds to the needs of the predominantly young population. The project establishes participatory processes with local cooperatives and stakeholders. Working with, rather than against the topography, the scheme includes a collective hill-farming program, community buildings, and a market. Existing wetlands will be improved with aquatic macrophyte plants and intercepted with a network of pedestrian bridges and pathways. 

Using local materials as well as empowering the local labor force, the Kora Participatory Plan offers cost effective, re-applicable solutions that respect the Rwandan tradition, improved by a contemporary sense of public space aesthetics. 

The project’s strength is its transferability, due to its “local-culture friendly” core. It results in a wide range of cost-effective and adaptable solutions – respectful of the Rwandan tradition and improved by a contemporary sense of public space aesthetics. Combining strategies, the master plan’s success is enhanced by providing local inhabitants with a strengthened awareness of the power of their traditional territory governance practices.

Co-op Capacity Building embeds social equity in its process and developed out of an academic project where diverse student teams interviewed 30 Kora families, taking account of their infrastructural and emotional needs. The community requested employment opportunities, a New Community Center including Genocide Memorial, the Agaseke Kiwacu Women’s Cooperative, and a new outdoor community market that will be ideal place for the Umuganda as well – a mandatory gathering where the entire community defines the working week priorities together, through social agreement.

The main strategy does not fight against the Kora topography, but engages with it as a shaping and adaptive landmark. At the same time, the project conserves biodiversity, and also introduces new green areas that transform the Kimisagara Wetland West Side into terraces planted with climbing beans and other vegetables. It is a priority to bring food production areas as close as possible to the quarter, to reduce costs caused by challenges of accessibility to local streets.

Kora means “work” in the Rwandan language: the project aims to accommodate community needs through the involvement of the local cooperatives. The new community center will be built by Kora cooperative workers on the site where the Memorial and Agaseke Kiwacu Women’s Cooperative are incorporated together, and also providing custom-designed spaces where the women will be able to sell the produce. The objective is to create a large hill-farming area, where former villagers forced away by genocide will be able to obtain work in agriculture.

The design of the building’s architecture achieves a real fusion with the landscape: elegant and respecting the natural environment. The Community Center blends into its context, featuring cladding in patterns using local brick, and hand-woven banana curtains.