Harvard GSD students address planning and design challenges in Nairobi slum; Innovative "parks" to improve living conditions
Imagine for a minute, all Bostonians living in a space two-thirds the size of Central Park without a single trash can among them. Such is Kibera Nairobi, a slum where every space not occupied by mud housing is covered in layers of trash. Together, with residents of Kibera, the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) are reclaiming a trash covered river bank as a revenue-generating community node complete with composting farm, water-filtration station, toilet facility, and play space using bricks, tin barrels, plastic water bottles, and a little bit of elbow grease. And that’s just the first project.
The Kounkuey Design Initiative, a not-for-profit design firm led by Harvard-trained architects, landscape architects, and urban planners, is committed to collaborating with communities in informal settlements to develop tactical, context-appropriate design interventions that alleviate the environmental degradation affecting daily life. KDI looks for ways to redefine problems as opportunities and then work to make sure those opportunities become reality.
Led this summer by Chelina Odbert (MUP ‘07) and Jennifer Toy (MLA/MUP ’07), Productive Public Space: Exploring Hybridities in Informal Settlements is a project that seeks to provoke dialogue and call attention to an alternative model for poverty alleviation, quality of life improvement, and environmental remediation through public space production in slums. Odbert and Toy, founding members of the Cambridge, MA-based KDI, have spent the last year working with community members in the slum of Kibera Nairobi to conceptualize and design an incremental landscape infrastructure on a river that bisects the settlement. Through a series of public space nodes and connectors, the infrastructure provides community amenities that are sustained by the revenue that it produces. The first pilot project at one of the nodes is underway this summer.
The Kounkuey Design Initiative project has been supported by the GSD's 2006 Penny White Prize, and they have also just been awarded a 2007-2008 Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship. During their Van Alen Institue Fellowship term, Odbert and Toy will organize an exhibition, forum and media campaign to explore the possibilities for productive public space in Kibera and in the many slum environments like it in the developing world. They will exhibit an interactive productive public space at Van Alen Institute to demonstrate its potential to counteract environmental degradation, provided needed infrastructure, and create social and physical capital for communities—while avoiding the usual trap of slum upgrading in which reclaimed space becomes indefensible space that is ultimately squatted again, allowed to decay, or re-appropriated by the economically more advantaged. In conjunction with the exhibition, Odbert and Toy will publicize a series of “provocations” to alert those in the formal city of Nairobi to the realities in Kibera, and they will host a forum in New York to initiate dialogue among key groups from design, development, and government about solutions to environmental and social problems in informal settlements.
Van Alen Institute Fellowship website...