Excited to learn from Kibera

I think my focus for this trip has been a little too much on the poverty in Kibera. It will be eye-opening and challenging to see people living in difficult conditions -- without running water or electricity. But I recently read this article in the Boston Globe, titled Learning from Slums. It's about how "the world's slums are overcrowded, unhealthy - and increasingly seen as resourceful communities that can offer lessons to modern cities."

I hadn't really spent much time thinking how I might learn a great deal from the people in Kibera and how they make the most of their situation. As I've been poking around the web, I've found that Kibera is being studied by some of the top design schools in the country. It's a fascinating place.

This is one of my favorite quotes from that article in the Boston Globe:

"One of the misconceptions is that they're endless seas of mud huts," says
Robert Neuwirth, author of "Shadow Cities: a Billion Squatters, a New Urban
World," who spent two years living in squatter communities. "There's a
tremendous amount of economic activity - stores, bars, hairdressers,
everything."

When you think about it, and you're pessimistic, you can think "let's see -- a million people on 600 acres of land means about 1,500 people living on one acre" (an acre is about the size of a football field, including the end zones). For most of the people going on this trip, your family of four or five people live on about half an acre. By comparison, things are TIGHT in Kibera. And people are hungry.

But if you are optimistic about it, Kibera works. And people who come to Kibera, and to other urban areas, do so because it represents a step up from the rural poverty that they seek to escape. When you look at the growth in Kibera since the 1960s (see chart below)

You have to figure that part of that growth is population growth, but a good part of it is people migrating to Kibera. Why? It's close to Nairobi, so you can get a job (there are few if any jobs in many rural areas of Africa), and cities are vibrant places. Now, we'll need to think about how Kibera could be better managed, because it clearly could be better managed...

But there is a great deal about Kibera from which we can draw inspiration.

To get you started, please watch this provocative 3-minute TED talk by Stewart Brand about squatter cities. When he opens by talking about passing the 50% urban remark, he's referring to the fact that for the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural settings.

graph source: http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0227-population.html

Then, once your interest has been piqued, please watch this 14-minute TED talk by Robert Neuwirth, author of the book Shadow Cities (mentioned above in the quote from the Boston Globe). According to the TED site, he "finds the world’s squatter sites -- where a billion people now make their homes -- to be thriving centers of ingenuity and innovation."

He points out that by 2030, there will be 2 billion squatters; and by 2050, it will be 3 billion.

At about the 4:45 mark of the video, Neuwirth mentions ugali, the staple food of many people in Kenya. If you follow the link, you will see that, as of November 2008, the global economic crisis is making ugali less affordable in Kenya. This sort of inexpensive food is common in many areas of Africa -- a similarly inexpensive staple food in Ethiopia is injera.

At the 9:30 mark of the video, he mentions Toi Market. Unfortunately, his video was made in 2005, and the Toi Market was destroyed in the post-election violence on New Year's Day 2008. Here's a before-and-after image I found online.

Something we'll need to discuss in another post is the political situation in Kenya that led to rioting a little over a year ago...

But getting back to inspiration: here's another quote from the Globe article:

No one denies that slums - also known as shantytowns, squatter cities, and
informal settlements - have serious problems. They are as a rule overcrowded,
unhealthy, and emblems of profound inequality. But among architects, planners,
and other thinkers, there is a growing realization that they also possess unique
strengths, and may even hold lessons in successful urban development.

So while we may have some work we can do in Kibera, and while it would be great if we could raise some money to help folks at the Red Rose School do the work they are doing, I think we need to remain humble -- we're the outsiders coming to learn from the amazing people in Kibera.

I'll follow up with another post about the attitude of people in poverty, but I've read several accounts of how the children in Kibera are some of the most happy and enthusiastic children you'd ever want to meet. I experienced the same thing in rural areas of Ethiopia when I traveled there in the summer of 2006.

Let me end this posting with a question: How do these kids manage to stay so upbeat in such difficult life conditions? And what can we learn from them about how to live our lives in the affluence of the United States?

Those are my thoughts on a cloudy (though becoming sunny -- finally!) Tuesday in Durham, NC...

I'd love to see some comments!