Paper short abstract:

The city of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, is often described as modern,performing and smart city with futuristic connotations. This article aims to analyse how particular ephemeral events crystallized to shape the current spatiality of the city and render it a futuristic prone city.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, is often described as modern,performing and smart city with futuristic connotations. This article aims to analyse how particular ephemeral events crystallized to shape the current spatiality of the city and render it a futuristic prone city.

The article mobilizes postcolonial urbanism theory in general to understand how ephemeral events and dicourse around them produce space.The article particulary dialogues with the idea of “invention of Africa” advanced by the congolese scholar Valentin Mudimbe where he demonstrates how the discourse and reprensentations of space coalesces to form an imagined geography of that particular space.

Using three settlements in Kigali namely: *Biryogo*, a former “indigenous workers quarter” during the colonial period now core of the city. *Kangondo I* and *Bukinanyana* which resulted from the post genocide rural to urban migration now highly populated. The article the article investigates ways in which pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial ephemeral events and ensuing discourses have shaped the imagined geography of Kigali and its actual spatiality. Furthermore, the article investigates ways in which these historical ephemeral events foregrounds the actual and projected digitilization of the city.

The article employs archival research for both historical documents and maps to relate events and the ensuing discourse and spatiality, it also employs spatial analysis using QGIS software. in so doing, the article contributes to the urban historiograpy of Kigali and offers a crtic to the neutrality of digitalization of the city by demonstrating its dependence to the localized spatial-temporal events.