Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the role of emerging urban centres in Rwanda’s process of rural transformation and its implications for local development. More specifically it aims to show how these emerging centres are composed of and shaped by the everyday mobile practices of both rural and urban actors.

Paper long abstract:

Following its long term agenda of a transition towards a 100% urban society, the Rwandan government is promoting the growth of secondary cities and organizing selected rural service centres to become active development nodes. Driven by a strong developmental agenda, this urbanization is tightly controlled through 'Master Planning'. Even though the state takes the most powerful role in managing and directing urban development, a major challenge is the multitude of factors and actors driving urban growth which rigid and static blueprint planning cannot anticipate. Small towns are usually very dynamic and fast growing urban centres, blurry settlements with a rather fluid and heterogeneous population with corresponding diversification of livelihoods and lifestyles. They challenge the urban hierarchy and recompose the urban landscape, reshaping the relationship between the rural and the urban creating a hybrid "rurban" space. This paper wants to analyse the role of small towns in Rwanda's process of rural transformation and its implications for local development. More specifically, it aims to show how these emerging centres are composed of and shaped by mobility flows of both rural and urban actors constituting a complex and fragmented process of in and outflow of people, goods, money, etc. While investigating the physical and virtual expansion of people's functional space, the article will further zoom in on how different actors are anticipating the changing functions and conditions of these towns. As such I want to bring back a focus on the role of peoples agency in the shaping of Rwanda's transforming countryside.