Key information
Main city: Nairobi, Kenya.
Scope: Sub-city level
Lead organisations: Kounkuey Design Initiative
Timeframe: 2006 – ongoing
Themes: Informal settlements; Climate change; Infrastructure; Planning and design; Public space; Resilience and risk reduction
Total budget (construction only, excluding staff time): USD 630,000. Funders: Multiple funders and in-kind contributions for different KPSP sites, including: Kibera community members and community groups, Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust, Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture, Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA), Nairobi City County (NCC), re:arc institute, Swiss Re Foundation, SwedBio, Start Somewhere, Welthungerhilfe.
Approaches used in initiative design and implementation:
- Community management of basic services and public goods in informal contexts.
- Incrementally built climate resilience through a network of small-scale interventions.
- Informal settlement upgrading of underutilised, unsafe and degraded spaces.
- Participatory planning, design and development processes combining community knowledge with that of urban practitioners.
- Productive public spaces in marginalised urban communities that integrate basic services, climate adaptation and livelihoods.
Local Area: Kibera
Area type: Informal settlement
Description: 12 individual project locations across Kibera.
Level 1 administrative unit: Nairobi City County
Level 2 administrative unit: Kibra and Lang’ata constituencies
Initiative description
Background and context
Kibera is one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, spread over 13 densely populated villages on approximately 280 ha. publicly owned land, and home to around 250,000 people. Proximity to the Ngong River means residents face significant flood risk, especially during rainy seasons. Localised flooding associated with poor drainage and inadequate waste management is also prevalent. The poorest areas with lowest rents are usually located where flood risk is highest (Mulligan et al., 2016).
Kibera’s challenges are being exacerbated by increasingly intense weather events. The distribution of climate risk in Nairobi is highly uneven and unequal – a consequence of exposure to climate-related hazards as well as the vulnerability of residents and urban systems – and the scale of climate vulnerability in the city’s informal settlements is regularly exposed during times of heavy rainfall. A recent example of widespread flooding in May 2024 led to swift and brutal response by authorities, evicting residents and demolishing structures along riverbanks in informal areas across Nairobi.
Without undermining recognition of its vulnerabilities, Kibera also boasts an array of resources and social capital, including an energetic and enterprising population and many women and youth groups and community activists. Within this context, public space can be understood as another (relatively untapped) resource, with the potential to contribute towards both reducing climate vulnerability and meeting residents’ needs. The importance of good quality, open public spaces to equitable cities is widely recognised. Well designed and well used public spaces can help address common challenges like dumping, infrastructure neglect and lack of shade. They improve social cohesion and health, and build relational wellbeing, which plays a vital role in the lives of the marginalised low-income urban communities.
Historically, Nairobi's informal settlements have lacked adequate public spaces and sporadic government-led upgrading efforts have generally focused on large-scale infrastructure or housing, with limited community involvement. In recent years, a shift towards recognising the importance of community-driven approaches to urban development has led to the emergence of grassroots public space initiatives and partnerships between government agencies, NGOs and community-based organisations.
Public space development in Nairobi's informal settlements is influenced by a complex interplay of political, economic and social factors amongst key stakeholders, including government, community-based organisations, private sector and residents. Political support is crucial for the success of initiatives. Economic factors, such as funding availability and investment opportunities, influence projects’ pace and scale. And resource allocation, land use policies and regulatory frameworks all play a significant role in shaping the development landscape.
Summary of initiative
The Kibera Public Space Project (KPSP) is a network of individual projects across Kibera to transform degraded pieces of land into productive public spaces that serve the community and build climate resilience. KPSP is an example of the integrated design and development of in situ informal settlement upgrading: it responds to the needs of marginalised Kibera residents, connects and capacitates a network of community groups, and demonstrates how urban public spaces can contribute to economic development and wellbeing – while also delivering workable climate resilience solutions across an informal settlement’s watershed.
Agencies involved
KPSP was initiated in 2006 by Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a non-profit design and community development organisation founded in Nairobi. Technical partners on individual projects have included Kenyan and international universities and civil society organisations, design and engineering consultants, Nairobi City County and national government agencies. Although KPSP’s funding model relies primarily on donors and grants, the community plays a crucial role, contributing up to 5% of project costs through a combination of voluntary work (alongside paid labour) and capital investments. Additionally, community members invest their uncompensated time in the co-design process, which, though unquantifiable, is another valuable contribution.
Project locations
At time of writing (late 2024), KPSP consists of 12 public space developments across Kibera, referred to chronologically as KPSP01, KPSP02, and so on. Each space (ranging from around 100m2 to 1000m2) is designed and built by professional designers and community workers in collaboration with Kibera-based community groups. The latter suggest a project in response to KDI’s “call for proposals”, then collaborate in the design, planning and implementation stages, before taking on long-term management responsibilities for the space, with capacity building support as needed. Technical experts involved in designing each site’s context-specific urban drainage and flood risk mitigation interventions draw on international design and engineering principles, as well as nature-based-systems’ guidelines (Mulligan et al., 2020). Development involves collaboration with local government agencies and some drainage, water supply and sewerage systems have been connected to municipal trunk infrastructure. In addition, two major pedestrian bridges were constructed by the county and national roads and public works authorities, connecting KPSP sites in Kibera to the more formalised Langata side of the Ngong River (at KPSP05 and KPSP07; Mulligan et al., 2020).
Projects span a diversity of Kibera’s neighbourhoods, including some of its poorest areas. Selection of project locations, in consultation with Kibera residents, looks for underutilised spaces with potential to transform into climate-resilient areas that address community needs. These have included swampy or eroded land considered unbuildable, crime hotspots, and informal dumpsites. Nearly all are near watercourses: flood-prone riversides or major drainage pathways. Many also represent key access points for pedestrian and vehicular movement.
KPSP’s approach is to apply innovative solutions to complex problems through a design and development process that bridges and combines community knowledge with that of urban practitioners. Following site selection, shared decision making on programmes and budget allocation, identification of location-specific community needs, and project design are carried out using participatory methods and extensive consensus-building activities (such as workshops, visioning sessions, mapping exercises and prototyping). Partnering with local groups and sourcing local labour means residents are integrated into each stage of the process: space selection, planning, construction, monitoring, ongoing management and maintenance. In this, KDI works with existing community groups or supports the establishment of new groups.
Development is informed by the concept of “productive public space”, with KPSP projects designed around a set of integrated interventions that address a neighbourhood’s specific social, economic and environmental needs in concert. Many spaces house community services and facilities run by women and youth groups. These build capacities and skills while generating income for livelihoods and to cover project infrastructure maintenance costs. Projects providing community-run essential services have (variously) constructed laundry areas, water and sanitation blocks, kiosks for small businesses and spaces for urban agriculture and childcare facilities. Health, wellbeing and social needs have been addressed with playgrounds, gardens and open and clean public spaces for gathering. Environmental components build resilience to flood risk and reduce climate vulnerability through a portfolio of demonstrable and replicable solutions that also promote community-led climate adaptation. Components include rainwater capture for urban farming, riverbank stabilisation, community clean-up activities, landscaping, waste-filtering wetland systems, wastewater-flow and drainage control systems, permeable pavements, a stormwater detention tank and climate-adaptive improvements to three informal schools. Some projects reinforcing eroded areas near watercourses have incorporated critical infrastructure such as pedestrian bridges and improvements to access paths, increasing the flow of people to the new public space (and therefore its use and economic potential).
Target population, communities, constituents or "beneficiaries"
Across the 12 KPSP developments, 3,470 households (250-500 per site) living within a 100m radius have directly benefited from project services. A further 15,615 households living nearby (1,125-2,250 per site) are classed by KDI as indirect beneficiaries.
Public spaces are known to foster community interaction and a sense of belonging among the communities who use them, strengthening social ties and reducing isolation. Public spaces that provide essential amenities and recreational areas contribute to a better quality of life and healthier, safer communities. In KPSP’s approach, productive public spaces also stimulate economic activity, attracting businesses, creating employment and improving livelihoods. Green spaces improve air quality, stormwater management and biodiversity. The climate-adaptive design of KPSP sites builds urban resilience, enhancing communities’ ability to withstand and recover from climate-related shocks and stresses, especially flooding. Lastly, KPSP design and implementation, in partnership with 13 community groups, has built skills and local ownership, connecting and capacitating a network of over 250 community leaders.
To illustrate these benefits, three examples of individual projects are summarised below.
KPSP01. Developed in 2006-2010 with the New Nairobi Dam Community (NNDC) group. Resident workshops identified their neighbourhood’s most pressing issues to be flooding, safety, economic deprivation and lack of child-friendly areas. The project constructed a pavilion (used as a school and church) and community gardens, and supported establishment of a women-led savings and credit programme, a women’s crafts cooperative and a composting enterprise. In 2014, the site was extended as part of KPSP06, with further flood risk management solutions, such as bamboo planting, a footbridge and a dry composting toilet block. The community chose dry sanitation technology because flooding risk ruled out septic options and municipal infrastructure connection was unfeasible. After more than 15 years, the NNDC group continue to operate and add components to the site (agriculture, brick production, recycling), including in partnership with ministries, NGOs, private sector and civil society groups.
KPSP05. Developed in 2013-15 with the Kibera Action Group Organisation, which proposed the site and continues to maintain the facility. Project design and implementation involved multiple iterations as well as additions of government components. The site originally straddled a major drainage pathway and a natural spring, making it wet and swampy. It is now a major community hub and contains a sanitation facility, flexible community space and laundry facilities. There are various successful economic initiatives on the site, thanks to its location at a key river crossing. Location made it unfeasible to connect to municipal sewer lines, so project partners explored alternative decentralised solutions. The sanitation block connects to a septic and wetlands system that filters waste, stabilises the riverbank and restores surrounding habitats. It is now part of a major pedestrian route running along the south side of Kibera and a government-built pedestrian footbridge has been added.
KPSP07. Implemented in 2014–2015 with Kibera United For Our Needs (KUFON) group. This is the largest KPSP site, located at a busy river crossing. The integrated approach to local livelihood needs and climate risk involved constructing a stone-filled gabion wall and planted retaining wall as flooding barriers, as well as a play area, pavilion and income-generating facilities (commercial kiosks, sanitation block and laundry). KUFON were involved in design, planning and construction, and supported to set up management structures and financial systems to operate and manage facilities. The development’s success has helped catalyse a closer, more formalised relationship between residents and Nairobi City County, and the site has been connected with a trunk sewer line. The space was badly damaged by extreme floods in 2024, and repair efforts became an opportunity for a coalition of partners to pool resources to improve the site’s resilience. Stronger gabion mattresses were added and the Kenya Urban Roads Authority constructed a new flood-safe bridge.
ACRC themes
The following ACRC domains are relevant (links to ACRC domain pages):
- Informal settlements (primary domain)
- Neighbourhood and district economic development
- Youth and capability development
Informal settlements. Kibera’s informal settlement status characterises the everyday challenges residents face: lack of basic services and infrastructure, crime, poverty, unemployment and tenure insecurity. In the absence of adequate facilities, open spaces are often used to meet sanitation and waste disposal needs.
Neighbourhood and district economic development. KPSP’s approach to developing productive public spaces improves livelihood and employment opportunities alongside climate resilience and service provision.
Youth and capability development. Youth play an indispensable role in African cities’ inclusive urban development, yet face disproportionate challenges, such as in accessing quality education and secure work. KPSP interventions include youth-focused components, such as KPSP04, which involved the participation of local youth who were engaged in antisocial activity, and supported the creation of a new youth group with an office built at the site. Most Kibera residents are under 35, and youth participation in KPSP design, planning, construction and ongoing facilities management has resulted in spaces that better serve the needs of young people.
The following ACRC crosscutting themes are also relevant (links to ACRC domain pages):
Gender
KPSP interventions create facilities and strengthen initiatives that support women’s reproductive (household and child care), productive (economic activities) and community roles, for example by constructing playgrounds and daycare centres, laundry pads and spaces for women-led saving and credit groups to meet. The KPSP Women’s Network (aka Super Mamas) is a community group established by women from Kibera which engages in table banking and making and selling crafts and clothes.
KDI sets targets for participation in KPSP projects, aiming to involve 50% women across co-design, co-construction and management of spaces. Having women active in construction, including as managers, has helped normalise their involvement in traditionally male-dominated spaces.
Climate change
KPSP’s design both highlights and addresses Kibera’s climate vulnerability. Vast parts of the settlement suffer periodically from flooding, with associated spread of disease and damage to livelihoods, homes and assets. Many KPSP sites along the river are designed to accommodate floodwaters during heavy rainfall and storms, with early warning and hazard signals also built into some sites. Flood levels are set through a combination of resident consultation and mapping, and hydraulic flood modelling produced by BuroHappold and the Technical University of Kenya (Mulligan et al., 2020).
The KPSP network is part of Daraja, an urban early weather warning system piloted in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which disseminates information through local radio and signposts in public spaces, allowing residents to identify flooding and other climate risks and share information with others in their community.
What has been learnt?
Effectiveness/success
Understanding of success
KPSP has sought to actively involve multiple stakeholders, including Kibera residents and local authorities, in creating a network of integrated public spaces that address multiple environmental risks, while also building social and economic resilience. Understanding of success for this initiative connects with two of the preconditions ACRC identifies as catalysts for urban reform.
Mobilised and organised citizens. Kibera’s residents participate in identification, design and implementation of the public space projects, allowing community knowledge and expertise, as well as needs and priorities, to set the foundation for the work. Separately and as a network, the projects anchor ongoing collective mobilisation through citizens’ use of the spaces and their role in maintaining them, and by advocating for project components that address the needs of identified vulnerable groups, such as women and children.
Formal or informal reform coalitions. Collaborative practices across difference are central to KPSP’s integrated approach to developing sites. These strengthen and sometimes even formalise relationships between government agencies and community groups, international and Kenyan civil society, and urban practitioners – for example, KPSP07’s trunk connections and bridge (described above), and KPSP10 which was implemented in partnership with Andolo Bridge Community Group and three universities, Technical University of Kenya, KTH and Stockholm University.
How successful has the initiative been?
Understanding stakeholder power dynamics and relationships is not always easy, but it is essential for effectively developing public spaces in informal settlements like Kibera. By building strong partnerships and fostering collaboration to create lasting, inclusive public spaces, KPSP has demonstrated strategies to confront these challenges.
Public spaces. KPSP’s immediate benefit is public space in a place where there is none, with associated services (including social and political) for residents. The initiative has transformed degraded or underutilised land into vibrant community hubs that serve neighbourhoods’ social and economic needs and enhance wellbeing. In addition to addressing flood risk, spaces provide underserved communities with sanitation and other essential services. And by integrating income generation into project design they provide livelihood opportunities and secure project sustainability.
Technical solutions and incremental learning. KPSP’s network of public spaces has grown incrementally since 2006, in the process testing and demonstrating the feasibility of a large portfolio of low-cost technical solutions to addressing flood risk and climate vulnerability in informal and unplanned urban areas. Monitoring processes involve community participation, ensuring lived realities and lessons from previous projects are folded into subsequent ones.
Government engagement and investment. Despite the complexities characterising land and governance in informal settlements, nearly all sites continue to serve their communities. Some have succeeded in being formally adopted by local authorities or connected to municipal infrastructure. Others have attracted interest and investment from national government agencies. In this, KDI’s view is that KPSP spaces represent “niche experiments” that expose government to concrete evidence of new and innovative approaches to public realm infrastructure (Mulligan et al., 2020).
Participatory methodologies. KPSP projects are demonstrating in real ways how decision making power can be shared in urban development. Project partners observe that a consistent challenge in Kibera (and elsewhere) is that community perspectives are rarely integrated into planning processes. It is critical that marginalised and informal urban communities are engaged in being part of solutions for meeting their needs, and KPSP contributes evidence demonstrating the importance of community knowledge to urban development planning.
Social infrastructures driving climate-resilient upgrading. At a larger scale, KPSP projects demonstrate how public and social infrastructure can be central to shaping slum upgrading approaches for better outcomes. This is in contrast to historical approaches to upgrading in Kenya and elsewhere that have focused exclusively on hard infrastructure or housing, without recognising the potential contributions of existing social networks. KPSP has successfully built local-scale capacity to appreciate and steward climate-resilient infrastructure (Mulligan et al., 2020). Its successes underscore the value of community-led contributions in incremental, in situ informal settlement upgrading processes that address both short-term climate risks and the need for sustainable adaptation (Mulligan et al., 2016).
Understanding limitations
Land ownership. The politics of urban informality overlaps with unclear land ownership and usage rights, hindering development efforts. At times, KPSP projects' longevity has been affected by Kibera’s underlying precarity as an informal settlement on government-owned land. Two sites have been lost in part or in full. A section of KPSP01, on which a garden and playground were built, became the site of a dispute and was lost to land-grabbing by local politicians. (Other components remained intact, a credit to durable and socially embedded project design.) And in 2016, KPSP03, which included a soil-stabilised wall, kiosk, school and health clinic, was taken over by city authorities and completely removed to install a municipal sewer line, without replacement or compensation. Informal structures were built back on top.
Governance weaknesses. Pace of state investment in Kibera’s infrastructure and service provision has noticeably increased in recent years – such as the sewer that caused KPSP03 to be demolished (Mulligan et al., 2020). In 2020, large parts of the settlement were designated a “special planning area” [1] by Nairobi City County, a further step in redefining its status and relationship with the state. While this presents opportunities for local initiatives to intersect with larger processes, municipal capacity to design, deliver, regulate and maintain urban drainage infrastructure in Nairobi’s informal settlements remains poor and inconsistent (Mulligan et al., 2020). This limits the potential for authorities to adopt, connect up or engage with existing sites, such as KPSP, or to integrate the innovative solutions KPSPS sites demonstrate into wider city systems and processes. As examples, KPSP04 and KPSP08 both link to the municipal sewer grid, but the drainage systems constructed are not adopted or maintained by authorities. Instead, residents have had to establish sewer committees and manage things themselves. This places heavy risk, cost and burden on community-managed models, especially in the long run as maintenance needs increase.
Other challenges. KDI’s experience is that developing public space in Nairobi’s informal settlements involves navigating complex bureaucratic processes. Securing necessary permits can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Limited financial resources and lack of technical expertise can constrain construction and maintenance. Community engagement in development processes has also at times been challenging, particularly in terms of building consensus amongst diverse resident groups and ensuring active participation. Lastly, the experience has been that security and safety issues of crime and vandalism also pose a threat to the sustainability of public spaces.
[1] The pioneering SPA approach taken in Mukuru, another large informal settlement in Nairobi, is discussed in another ACRC urban reform case study.
Potential for scaling and replicating
KPSP is itself an example of incremental scaling and learning; honing a delivery model over 18 years by integrating lessons learnt from previous interventions into the design of new ones, while keeping faithful to local context and specific community priorities in each area. Community groups connect and learn from each other’s efforts, with sites often located up- or downstream from earlier projects.
Professional learning around the initiative has also evolved, capitalising on KDI’s international network. This has led to a new, larger research project involving KDI, several Swedish universities and one Kenyan university to study adaptation-focused interventions in public spaces that build urban flood resilience. The sites at KPSP10 and KPSP11 are part of this research.
KPSP is cited in academic and practice literature as an example of community-driven and nature-based development (see, for example, Borie et al., 2019; Douglas, 2018 Diep et al., 2019). For KDI, the potential to scale and replicate the KPSP model centres on its “layered” approach to upgrading that contributes to informing the efforts of larger integrated resident- and government-led planning processes. Layered here has two meanings: responsive in situ upgrading approaches that build improved access, infrastructure and services over existing settlement patterns (that is, rather than demolish and replace); and the layering of different knowledge frameworks – the Kibera community’s local knowledge, technical expertise around urban drainage and flood risk, and green infrastructure planning innovations for ecological repair and climate resilience (Mulligan et al., 2020).
In other Nairobi neighbourhoods, KDI, working in partnership with Slum Dwellers International and Akiba Mashinani Trust, is taking the KPSP approach into implementing the Urban Fabric Initiative, a participatory infrastructure upgrading project which is part of the second Kenya Informal Settlements Improvement Project (KISIP 2). KDI has also applied learnings from KPSP to work in Haiti, Ghana and Argentina, and has replicated the KPSP model in rural California. And in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Centre for Community Initiatives and Tanzania Urban Poor Federation have applied KPSP processes to develop nature-based solutions projects in their upgrading work in Vingunguti informal settlement.
The KPSP model is recognised as environmental best practice by UN-Habitat, and in 2020 won the Ross Prize for Cities. The World Bank’s Handbook on Gender Inclusive Urban Planning and Design, co-authored by KDI, builds on experience and approaches developed by KPSP. KPSP methodology and cases also influenced development of the UN-Habitat HerCity toolbox, which enables girls to participate in urban design and planning.
Participating agencies
Further information
Further resources
References
Borie, M, Pelling, M, Ziervogel, G and Hyams, K (2019). “Mapping narratives of urban resilience in the global south”. Global Environmental Change 54: 203-213.
Diep, L, Dodman, D and Parikh, P (2019). “Green infrastructure in informal settlements through a multiple level perspective”. Water Alternatives 12(2): 554-570.
Douglas, I (2018). “The challenge of urban poverty for the use of green infrastructure on floodplains and wetlands to reduce flood impacts in intertropical Africa”. Landscape and Urban Planning 180: 262-272.
Mulligan, J, Bukachi, V, Clause, JC, Jewell, R, Kirimi, F and Odbert, C (2020). “Hybrid infrastructures, hybrid governance: New evidence from Nairobi (Kenya) on green-blue-grey infrastructure in informal settlements”. Anthropocene 29: 100227.
Mulligan, J, Harper, J, Kipkemboi, P, Ngobi, B and Collins, A (2016). “Community-responsive adaptation to flooding in Kibera, Kenya”. In Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Engineering Sustainability 170(5): 268-280. Thomas Telford Ltd. Available online [pdf] (accessed 21 January 2025).
Odbert, C and Mulligan, J (2014). “The Kibera Public Space Project: Participation, integration, and networked change”. In Now Urbanism: The Future City Is Here (Routledge, page 177.
Tyrrell, M and Odbert C (2013). “Kibera Public Space Project”. Landscape Architecture Australia (139): 66-69.
Cite this case study as:
Dessie, E, Oranga, A and Lines, K (2025). “Kibera Public Space Project”. ACRC Urban Reform Database case study. Manchester: African Cities Research Consortium, The University of Manchester.