About the Kounkuey Design Initiative
Kounkuey design initiative (KDI) began in spring 2005 as a discussion between students at the Harvard Design School in the landscape architecture and urban planning departments. The dialogue focused on the relevancy of design practice to urbanization patterns in developing countries, and the consequent effects on the environment and people. The momentum behind KDI also stemmed from individual work members had done in education, the Peace Corps, post-tsunami planning, development in Tibet, and participatory planning in Brazil. Out of frustration with the standard client/patron model which designers often work within and which leads to a limited type of work opportunity, the members formed KDI. Their goal was to provide a business model through which they could identify, initiate and generate socially and environmentally urgent projects on their own.
The mission of the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) is to generate and implement entrepreneurial landscape strategies in degraded physical environments. We believe in an iterative community process that provokes dialogue between residents, designers, technical consultants, government officials and the private sector. KDI seeks to mobilize resources to quickly activate scaleable and sustainable projects in the client community.
KIBERA NAIROBI KENYA AUGUST 2006, phase 1
Summary
In August 2006 KDI worked with residents of Kibera, Nairobi to identify perceived needs and future project opportunities. With community members from two different villages, we developed workshop activities for them to explore the existing conditions of their neighborhood and to propose idealized solutions. They presented these ideas to each other through photography, drawing, writing, mapping and models.
More broadly, KDI sought to evaluate the existing opportunities for action. In addition to exchanging ideas with the community groups, we met with many NGOs, the city council’s Safer Nairobi Initiative, local designers, as well as landscape architecture students from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
Over the two weeks, we learned that trash and pollution in the rivers and streets is the source and cause of many systemic social and health-related problems. Through designed environmental interventions, we believe there is an opportunity to address the issues identified by the community at both a local tangible scale, as well as a broader watershed level. Our hope is to pursue the cleaning and development of the Nairobi Dam, which borders the settlement to the southeast. Through this project, we can develop a strategy for the reclamation of this now polluted water body while building projects that benefit communities upstream.
Phase 2
The second phase of this process has two components. The overall concept is to quickly build small community-based projects that can help leverage resources and political will to work towards larger systemic change. Notably, we see our role as working in between bottom-up and top-down positions. In this stage, we will work more closely with local organizations to build a series of small projects that can demonstrate “facts on the ground.” With these successes – KDI’s purpose is to then demonstrate to key decision-makers and funders the possibility and the imperative for change. In this way, we seek to connect a large-scale project such as the Nairobi Dam cleanup with the smaller-scale changes required for its success.