Building Stock and Building Typology of Kigali, Rwanda

Dynamically changing urban agglomerations in emerging countries in the Global South experience rapid changes in their urban extent and morphology, due to a growth of population and migration, as well as socioeconomic developments. It is important to have access to updated information on the qualitative and quantitative status of settlements, in order to monitor and inform the housing sector, spatial and infrastructure planning, municipal revenue collection and budgeting, and the supply of social services. Very high-resolution (VHR) multispectral satellite images are one important, cost effective, source of regular, updated, data on urban land-use and built-up areas. The authors acquired a Pléiades satellite image from August 2015 for the central part of the capital of Rwanda, Kigali. Object-based image analysis (OBIA) and expert-based post-classification were then applied to derive building footprints and building heights, and to assign all buildings to nine building archetypes. In a second step, building footprint data from aerial images of the same area in 2008-2009 were analysed, to identify the change of the building stock in the respective period. In total, 165,625 built entities have been detected for 2008-2009 and 211,458 for 2015; this entails a 27.7% increase in the number of buildings. The dataset presented is a completely revised version of a dataset that was used for a published report on the housing supply in Kigali in 2018.