Cynthia leads a workshop in Kibera. Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

Over the course of a week, I led a series of placemaking trainings with 40 staff people from seven city council departments, the Kilimanjaro Initiative, UN-Habitat, and several local organizations working on the ground in the Kenyan capital, as part of an ongoing partnership. When talking about expanding public space within the city, I kept bumping up against this assumption from the Nairobi staff  that this meant they had to buy big chunks of land and even clear people out of existing neighborhoods to make room for new parks. The idea that schoolyards and sidewalks, streets, plazas, and fire stations could be meaningful places within the city’s public realm was new to them. There’s a division, for many in Nairobi, between “Public Spaces” and spaces that merely happen to be public.

Reasons for this division aren’t hard to figure out. We worked at two specific sites during the trip, in very different neighborhoods. The first was an athletic field in the Silanga section of Kibera, purportedly the largest informal settlement in Africa. Our project was to re-think the field as a multi-use community destination, but just walking through the surrounding  neighborhood was so eye-opening. Kibera’s buildings are built mostly out of sheets of corrugated metal, and its streets are packed dirt. The main (and only) thoroughfare here, Kibera Road, is a pretty amazing place. It has an intense mix of activity, all right out there on the street: a huge variety of vendors, people getting their hair braided, people cooking, socializing, reading the paper, kids doing their homework. But the infrastructure is terrible. It’s a clear-cut example of how Nairobi has so much public space that people don’t even recognize as public space.

Shops along Kibera Road. Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

Back in the center of the city, our second site was a very formal English garden donated to the city by the Jeevanjee family. I visited the site with several members of the family and the city council who had recently been to New York. They’d seen successful public spaces all over the city, and when we visited the garden, I said ‘Think of this as the Bryant Park of Nairobi!’ The space had been kept very pristine, and they didn’t have an idea of how it could evolve. Once we started talking about it with Bryant Park as a reference point, they got really excited. The idea that this could still be a lovely green place that was also full of activity was something that sunk in very quickly.

"Think of this as the Bryant Park of Nairobi!" Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

Promoting the idea that existing spaces could become really wonderful pieces of public life was so important on this trip. The idea that you can do many small things instead of a few big things–that placemaking doesn’t have to be capital-intensive–is critical in a city like Nairobi, where so much economic activity is still informal. Public spaces there have to provide a way for people to earn a living. Vendors, hawkers, performers: these are people whose livelihoods depend on active public spaces. Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper interventions that change things right now are what’s going to raise the quality of life in Nairobi; not big new parks on the edge of town that take years to build.

Children play at the Silanga athletic field next to a sign advertising coming infrastructural improvement. Photo: Ulrik Nielsen, Gehl Architects

At one point, I showed a slideshow of possible examples for how the athletic field in Silanga could be made into a more vibrant hub for the community, and the group had already come up with a lot of the same ideas on their own. It’s one thing to suggest to people what they could do; it’s an entirely different thing to show them, ‘This is what they did in a slum in Rio; this what they did in a slum in Colombia, where the neighborhood used to be completely run by gangs,’ and to have them see that what they’ve envisioned is totally possible. When a few dedicated people take ownership of a place and band together to push through existing misconceptions about what public space “should” look like and how it can function for the people that want to use it–that’s where placemaking starts.

Work on the two pilot sites will continue, spearheaded by the Nairobi City Council and supported by UN-Habitat (whose international headquarters are located in the nearby Girgiri neighborhood) with PPS providing technical support.  Two down, 58 more to go!

A marketplace in Cairo

For many women and girls around the world, just passing through a public space- a market, a crowded street or riding the bus – is cause for great anxiety: the threat of sexual harassment can be terrifying and have lingering psychological impacts and consequences.  Unfortunately, patterns of sexual abuse in urban public spaces are often seen as an unavoidable part of urban life and generally speaking, not therefore recognized as a problem either by local governments, enforcement agencies, or the public.

Cynthia Nikitin

As part of PPS’ ongoing relationship with the UN-Habitat, I flew to Cairo to join over 100 participants from more than 12 countries who are working together to bring an end to sexual harassment and violence against women and girls in public spaces at the 2011 UN Women Designing Safe Cities with Women and Girls Stakeholder Planning Meeting. UN Egypt reported on the event.

In what spaces do women suffer most from sexual harassment?
Many, many topics were covered during the planning meeting- but what I found most startling was the emphasis about public space as places where women suffer most from sexual harassment and gender based violence.  While most public spaces in North American cities and those of the West in general – markets in particular – are usually where one is most likely to find police, an on site management presence, guards, and watchful neighbors, in the Global South and developing countries, public spaces are the most dangerous places to be for women and girls, and the least supervised as well.

At a marketplace in Cairo

How can Placemaking Help Prevent Sexual Harassment in Public Spaces?

Streets, squares, and parks, the focus of our initial work at PPS, are often chaotic, poorly planned and maintained places (if they exist at all in disadvantaged and under-resourced communities).   Once transformed, however, public spaces are anchors to safe, inclusive and thriving urban centers.

Moreover, an improved public environment can have a catalytic impact on a city: enhancing the delivery of basic social and infrastructural services, driving the creation of economic and cultural activity, expanding mobility options, and nurturing a cohesive, civil society based upon mutual respect between men and women.  Finally, as a grassroots process, Placemaking provides a way to concretely engage people – especially women and youth – in planning and implementing pubic space improvements in their communities.

Traffic in Cairo

Change the Physical Environment to Change Behavior

What became clear to me over the 4 days of the conference was how important it was to and perhaps even easier it might be to make changes to the physical environment in order to influence behavioral patterns and minimize the fear factor of sexual violence that haunts women the world over. Instead, the goal of the conference organizers and the Safer Cities for Women and Girls program is to change the mindset of men and boys, advocate for and protect the rights of women, build the capacity of women to voice their views,  raise awareness of the seriousness of this issue (98% of all foreign female visitors to Cairo cite being sexually harassed for example), change cultural patterns and legal systems, educate police and local governments to be more responsive to women’s concerns and build public trust in these institutions.

Using a grassroots process to redesign the public spaces where women live could be a much faster way to bring about the changes necessary to make cities safer for women.

But, by the end of the conference, and impacted by my presentation and conversations over the course of the 4 days event, there seemed to be an emerging recognition of the need to also address the built environment and its impact on women’s feeling of safety and security as a way of achieving on the ground immediate resolution of and means to begin to deconstruct long held systemic belief systems and insensitive legal structures.  Redesigning bus stops and stations, train stations, public markets, and all the places where women live and go through a grass roots process which includes and empowers them could prove to be a much faster way to bring about the changes that will make cities safer for women.

Cairo

Rethinking Design to Include Safety Concerns

Partnerships with architects, urban planners, transit authorities, landscape architects and planning agencies and educating the design professions about ways to build projects from the outset that consider women’s safety as a key element of their design program could set the stage for and induce the psycho-social, behavioural, and cultural changes that need to take place before women are truly able to enjoy public spaces and engage fully in the civic life of their cities.

Breaking Down Silos for Stronger Safer City Initiatives

It is a question then of social movements geared towards making on the ground, visible changes, lead by empowered grassroots women, (which our friends at the Huairou Commission has been championing and achieving for the past 15 years) vs. a more considered, quantitative approach towards collecting analyzing and disseminating data around women’s safety to federal and state governments, local authorities and decision and policy makers.  Both are valuable, necessary approaches. However, when linked with designing, building, programming, managing and supporting the upgrading of public spaces, the safer cities initiatives themselves can become more effective more quickly .

Placemaking Dispatches from Cairo

I got to share Placemaking with a lot of amazing people involved in Safer Cities Initiatives.  Great walk around the markets and new parks with UN-HABITAT gals and a Cairo urbanologist/architect whose staff is crazy about us: Dina Shehayeb has done housing upgrade projects working with local residents and was part of the team that turned a landfill in Cairo into an amazing park, called Alazhar Park. Perhaps one of the best in the Arab world? See for yourself.

L to R: Cecilia Anderson, UN Habitat, Nairobi; Katja Schaeffer, UN Habitat, Cairo; Me; Dina Shehayeb, Researcher, Community Planner, Author; with Ahmad, whose father owns the shop behind us, and his friend.

Why does it take a hurricane, a terrorist attack or a revolution to get people to cooperate with their neighbors?

Barcelona, Spain

What constitutes a public space? Where do public and private jurisdictions end? Should the private sector be involved in managing public spaces?

Cynthia Nikitin

These questions were hotly contested at the recent public space conference “What’s the Place for Public Space in our Cites?” hosted by French think-tank The City Factory/La Fabrique de la Cité.  This convening marked the first academic and professional dialogue amongst French cities, professionals, and researchers as to what constitutes a public space. I kicked things off with an opening address on “What are good public spaces?”

It seemed like the majority of the French contingency was completely convinced that it is the job of municipal government  to build, provide, and manage public spaces whereas we in the US and Hamburg Germany have found public-private partnerships to be very successful and viable in the long term.

Check out this video by The City Factory/La Fabrique de la Cité. It’s a great exploration of the French perspective on public spaces.

[vimeo video_id="23487065" width="400" height="300" title="Yes" byline="Yes" portrait="Yes" autoplay="No" loop="No" color="ff0179"]

We also talked about how to measure the value of public spaces and what elements are most important to people (in London, Hamburg, Paris and Barcelona); what is public vs. private space; whether would BID’s would work in France; how transportation impacts cities; and highlighted the importance both of managing public spaces and engaging communities in defining, visioning, and designing them.

No matter the weather, people flock to Barcelona's Las Ramblas

Las Ramblas at night (Barcelona, Spain)

Next Steps

Next year’s conference will explore the issues related to the differing functions of public spaces in the global north vs. the global south and further discuss the various models of privately owned public space, privately managed publicly owned space, and public/private partnerships for maintaining, programming and building public space.  Stay tuned!

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Meg MacIver contributed to this post.