Back to Research Projects

The world’s rapidly growing slums pose the ultimate urban planning challenge: Providing immediate access to essential services such as drinking water, toilets, electricity, waste collection, and safe housing while generating long-term strategies to ensure land and political rights for slum dwellers. In Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi approximately two million people reside in over 180 different slums, and many are under the constant threat of eviction by private land holders and the government. In 2008, the Kenyan Ministry of Environment and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) announced the latest phase of the Nairobi River Basin Programme, which included a plan to clean up the river by razing all informal structures within a 30 meter ‘riparian reserve’ along the Nairobi River, likely displacing over 127,000 slum dwellers from their homes and businesses and destroying schools, health centers, and urban agriculture.

Over the summer of 2009, a team of UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students, led by DCRP Associate Professor Jason Corburn, will attempt to provide alternatives to the river clean-up displacement plan for informal settlements in the Mathare Valley of Nairobi. The interdisciplinary team of students and faculty are partnering with Kenyan-based NGOs Pamoja Trust and Muungano va Wanjivivi, students and faculty from the University of Nairobi’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and UN-HABITAT’s Water, Sanitation and Infrastructure Branch in Nairobi. The team hopes to develop physical and social plans that:

• avoid widespread displacement;
• outline a strategy for granting land tenure to slum residents, and
• draft strategies for upgrading sanitary infrastructure, roads and other basic services.
   

During the summer studio course, students will research and create housing and infrastructure upgrade plans that aim to improve river water quality by limiting pollution while also improving living conditions. The hope is that comprehensive social, physical, and environmental plans can help residents build political power, avoid eviction, and begin to address widespread discrimination, insecurity, and marginalization that slum dwellers often experience. In August 2009, the students will travel to Nairobi in order to refine these plans in collaboration with their partners. The trip is funded in part by UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies.

The project has gained international attention, as Amnesty International visited the slums of Nairobi in June 2009 and issued a report, “The Unseen Majority: Nairobi’s Two Million Slum Dwellers”(1), calling on the government to cease all eviction plan, meaningfully involve residents in the planning process, and ensure adequate access for all slum residents of essential services, particularly water and sanitation.

The Nairobi studio is engaging with the complex political, legal, environmental, technological, and other challenges that this project presents. Through a close partnership with Pamoja Trust and Muungano va Wanjivivi, the student strategies aim to build on existing strategies and contribute to the on-going social and economic activities of neighborhood savings federations. The savings federations organize residents and tap local knowledge about what types of interventions will work and be sustainable in specific communities over the long-term.

The UC Berkeley students are eager to contribute to this work, understanding that their plans are part of a complex and unpredictable upgrade process. According to Orlando Omonegas, a fourth-year architecture student, “The Nairobi project gives us a chance to apply the theory and design skills we have acquired into a real world application. Our collaborative efforts and ideas we produce are aiming to generate solutions — not ones to be presented to a design jury and quickly forgotten — but to be tested and tried by the community that may benefit from them the most.” Ayrin Zahner, a second-year M.C.P. student agrees: “Frankly, it’s the challenge that excites me. It’s an overwhelmingly complex project — structurally, socially, politically, and so on — but that’s the fun part.”

(1) Amnesty International. “Kenya: The Unseen Majority - Nairobi’s Two Million Slum-Dwellers.” London: Amnesty International Publications. (2009), 3.