Urban Design as a Development Strategy: The Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture Campus by MASS

The 15th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) campus in Bugesera, Rwanda, by MASS. In addition to detailing RICA’s innovations in sustainable design and its potential to transform agriculture in Africa, this exhibition highlights the process of the campus development as well as the project team’s commitment to experimentation within the field of urban design.

RICA’s master plan, led by MASS, includes more than 20,000 square meters of buildings and 1400 hectares of landscape in rural Rwanda. The project encompasses housing, academic spaces, barn storage, processing space, stormwater systems, human and animal waste management systems, and off-grid energy infrastructure. RICA harnesses symbiotic ecological and agricultural relationships, and regenerative principles to achieve greater crop yields, increased biodiversity, utilized waste streams, healthier soils, and cleaner water.

The Green Prize recognizes that RICA is more than a campus. The final design developed through a constant negotiation between city officials, motivated designers, and mobilized citizens. This process demonstrates how architecture and agriculture, land and community, city and nature, can be reconnected in ways that are environmentally sound, structurally rigorous, and socially meaningful.

RICA is the first project in the African continent to be awarded the Green Prize. It is also unique in this roster of Prize recipients for both its agro-based rural context, and its function as a space for learning. Fusing agricultural, ecological, and pedagogical design, RICA embodies a new paradigm that negotiates boundaries of urban/rural, infrastructure/landscape, and learning/living. By suggesting that the discipline’s principles can and should extend to rural development, ecological stewardship, and spatial learning, RICA projects a new frontier for urban design’s global relevance.

– Joan Busquets
Veronica Rudge Green Prize Jury Chair and Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design

gsd.harvard.edu