Abstract:
Urban green spaces constitute a fundamental part of an urban environment. Unfortunately, City of Kigali, Rwanda‘s largest and fastest growing city has lost much of its green spaces over time. This study aimed at assessing the dynamics of urban green spaces in Rwandan with particular reference to the City of Kigali and proposed alternative solutions towards a sustainable management of these spaces. The study proceeded with the case study approach and utilized publications that related to urban green spaces but most importantly centered on remote sensing whereby archived Landsat, Quick Bird and Worldview_2 images were classified and then analyzed using Erdas Imagine 2014. Moreover, this study also made use of the consultative approach (interviews) in order to have various views on the research topic.
The findings of the study revealed that green spaces in the City of Kigali are mainly composed by forests, wetlands, agricultural lands, public and private gardens, and roadside trees. It was found that the surface area covered by green spaces has been decreasing over time. As complement of results from the classification of satellite images, the majority of respondents confirmed the decrease of UGS. This decrease was revealed to be caused by different factors such as conversion to other land uses mostly through urban sprawl, weakness in the implementation of policies related to Green Spaces. To overcome these issues, this study proposed alternative solutions including among others; raising public awareness on the benefits of Urban Green Spaces in the City, compliance with Kigali master plan and other policies in regards with development and preservation of Green Spaces, encouraging private sector to invest in Green Spaces and finally reduction of urban sprawl by adopting high density buildings also known as compact city.
