Officials in the City of Kigali have invited city residents to use the time after doing community work (Umuganda) today and share their ideas about what should be considered in the city’s new construction Master Plan. The officials want residents to play a central role in the ongoing process of updating the city Master Plan in order to ensure the city growth in the future takes care of residents’ needs. The Director of Kigali Urban Planning and Construction One Stop Centre, Fred Mugisha, told The New Times yesterday that the idea is to get local officials to tell residents that the city is updating its master plan and then collect their ideas on what they think should be considered. The ideas will be submitted to city officials for consideration as consultants, who were hired from Singapore, design the city’s master plan for the next 30 years, up to 2050. “Every Kigali resident needs to know that the current Master Plan is still in use but now is a good time to give ideas on how they feel the new master plan for the city should look like,” he said in an interview. The City of Kigali has embarked on the update of the Kigali Master Plan, five years after its adoption in 2013. Residents have until the end of next month to submit their ideas to the city planners who are working with experts to design the city’s next master plan, Mugisha said. “Ideas from residents will be used to prepare the new master plan and what we need is as many residents as possible to give us their ideas,” he said. He explained that what residents will show as challenges to the implementation of the current master plan and what they think is the solution will be used to design the new master plan. During a meeting last week on reviewing Kigali City Master Plan, the city’s Mayor, Marie Chantal Rwakazina, said that the update and review of the Master Plan should be centred on increased participation of communities and their local leaders based on the experience of the past five years. The Master Plan will be revised to respond to the needs of a growing population in the city in the next 30 years up to 2050, including decent housing and access to services such as transport, water and sanitation, as well as electricity among others. Ahead of tomorrow’s discussions after Umuganda, some experts in the real estate industry have expressed the need for the city to be more engaged with stakeholders to hear their ideas if the next master plan is to address people’s needs. The President of the Institution of Engineers Rwanda, Papias Kazawadi, said in an interview that the city should emphasise in today’s discussions where people need to go in case they need credible information about the master plan. “People need to know where to go for reliable information because it affects them in the end when they get wrong information,” he said. He said that it needs to be clear to the people where to go while looking for building licences and information about the Master Plan in their areas among other needs. “What should be emphasised is explaining to the residents who are the right people to guide them in the implementation of the Master Plan. There are a lot of people who mislead others by giving them wrong information and it negatively affects them,” he said. For Natalie Campbell-Rodrigues, owner and managing director of Forrest Jackson Properties, a full-service real estate company in Kigali, the city should match construction plans with people’s needs. “People are being forced to build in a certain way and sometimes it’s not what the market wants. There needs to be a focus group discussion with developers and real estate companies to discuss what it is that the market wants,” she said. The project on the review of the city’s Master Plan started last month and will last for a period of 10 months ending in April 2019. editorial@newtimes.co.rw
