Locals mill about Silanga Field, which will soon become the Silanga Community Centre / Photo: PPS

In Nairobi, Kenya, the contrast between rich and poor neighborhoods is beyond stark.  And even though half of the city’s population lives on a mere 1.5% of the total land area, in Nairobi, public space is scarce. Since the creation, by Colonial powers in 1948, of the master plan that led to the formation of the city we now know today, little to no provision has been made for well structured common spaces for much-needed programming, activity, and services. In that same period, the city’s population has ballooned from 120,000 to more than 3.1 million people–and that’s just the official number! Nairobi is home to many informal settlements, where it’s very difficult to take an exact head count.

One of the most well-known of these settlements is Kibera, a massive slum comprised of 13 separate villages where most residents get by on less than a dollar a day. It is here where PPS has joined forces with UN-Habitat, the City Council of Nairobi, and local partners including the Kilimanjaro Initiative, KENSUP (the National Housing branch of the Kenyan Government), Chief of SOWETO (South West Township) in Kibera, and the Undugu Foundation, for one of two pilot projects in the city’s effort to create 60 great public spaces over the next several years.

Earlier this year in Kibera’s Silanga village neighborhood, PPS’s Cynthia Nikitin and Board Member Vanessa September met with community members to conduct a Placemaking workshop to generate ideas and support for the next phase of improvements to a soccer field that serves as an important recreation facility for this long-underserved community. Today residents continue to work toward the transformation of Silanga Field (which contains school facilities, a meeting room, a pottery studio, and other important resources) into what they have agreed, collectively, to re-name the Silanga Community Centre. “I have taken great delight in the confidence that is being displayed by the team in how they have taken ownership of the projects,” wrote PPS board member Vanessa September (who continues to work on the ground with partners) in a recent email. “If they have 58 more spaces to do, then the sooner they take ownership, the better!”

We have written previously on the Placemaking Blog about how dangerous social conditions produce alienating public spaces in developing world cities, especially for women. In Kibera, the desire for a safe and welcoming space for the community very clearly influences recommendations for everything from comfort to accessibility. A variety of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper improvements are included in an as-yet-unpublished report detailing recommendations generated through the Placemaking process, with many of them focused specifically on creating a safe space for people to gather. From using fences to define the perimeter of the site (and designate entrance and exit points), to programming the space, very intentionally, with local security meetings and social programs focused on youth and good parenting, the focus on safety plays a critical role.

“The best way to make a public space safe,” the report suggests, “is by creating positive activities in and enhancing wider citizen ownership of the space.”

We often say that public spaces reflect the communities that surround them; this can be both a good thing, and a bad thing. In Nairobi, the lack of adequate public spaces reflects the stark social divisions across the city and, worse yet, reinforces them. Since Nairobians rarely come into contact with people from different socioeconomic groups, there is little upward mobility for people in places like Kibera—diminishing one of the chief benefits of urban agglomeration. The lack of space communicates to these people that their presence is undesirable. This contributes directly to the sense of isolation and desperation that makes for more dangerous neighborhoods.

In wealthy areas, meanwhile, fear of the violence created by this tension leads to more fortress-like compounds and walled golf courses when what the city really needs are great public spaces, and shared destinations where people from different neighborhoods and backgrounds can take part in the formation of a shared civic identity. Spaces like the Silanga Community Centre are steps toward a stronger Nairobi.

Presently, the UN-Habitat is working with local partners to accurately survey the site, and prepare for the RFP process in order to push forward on Silanga Field’s reconstruction. The newly appointed City Planning Director, Mrs. Rose Muema, recently presented on progress at the site both at the World Urban Forum in Naples Italy and more recently to major donors from Norway, Sweden, and Spain, “[stressing] the importance of participatory approaches to development.”

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!