<aside> 📙
This project aimed to build trust between residents of Kiwaatule (Kampala, Uganda), to create strong foundations for revitalising this place: a residential suburb where social inequality is evident.
To do this we organised 5 collective imagination events in different neighbourhoods, where residents imagined their place as a living person - a mother who enables people to co-evolve with nature. Through these gatherings, we created a combined ‘Story of Place’ to support further collaboration to regenerate the area. The goal of this work is to generate the collective will of residents’ to shift their role from being consumers to caring and protecting/stewarding the natural and social vitality of their place, and ultimately to begin a journey to revitalise Kiwatule from a place dense with urban housing built in a swampy, wetland area, to its true essence: a green corridor dense with biodiversity supporting urban farming as well as human settlement on both sides of the valley.
</aside>
Kiwaatule is a residential suburb in Kampala, Uganda. Two forces are blocking its potential: a dying rural spirit that is no longer viable in an urban reality, and an urban spirit struggling for vitality and viability because it was built on fragmented land use from its colonial past.
During a Regenerative Development & Design course, we were invited to imagine a place in a regenerative future-state. Kiwaatule was envisioned as a lush green urban-corridor with the presence of humans enhancing the wetland and the presence of the wetland enhancing human wellbeing. From this vision emerged an idea to offer an alternative to the currently fragmented land use that has nearly decimated 30+ wetlands in Kampala.
If 'trust in place' is the blood flowing to fuel a place's vitality and viability, Kiwaatule is profusely bleeding from the systemic realities of colonialism and capitalism. Social inequality manifests as; fenced housing (where individuals have a fence around their house and land), neighbouring slum housing, built in a swampy, wetland area; littered neighbourhoods; dark spots of crime; deadly market fires, etc. In addition to this there's a dying spirit of abundance and collective action that once held the community together. Re-awakening this in an urban context requires the slow building of 'trust in place' by convening neighbourhoods to question myopic colonial-capitalist narratives and to co-create the future of Kiwaatule around traditional values of reciprocity, respect, gratitude and kinship with nature, etc.
Ultimately we are creating a collective learning atmosphere - learning together across generations, across fields, across cultures, and across processes of multi-species Kinmaking, Sensemaking, Meaning-making, and Change-making.
In total we organised 5 sessions that engaged residents of 3 neighborhoods of Kiwaatule. When we spoke to local leaders they said that people wouldn’t come. We hoped for 5-10 people, but we got twice as many, sometimes more. In the invitation letter, we highlighted that we're embarking on a different process of development, that centres around the unique essence and potential of our place, and the people’s collective imagination.
We had a first round of 2 sessions, approximately 2 hours long each, which were all about introducing ourselves, our values, our challenges, and the lives we dream of living here. In this round we asked questions that helped people tell stories of life in this place.
People said things like;
But It was the second round of sessions, where we re-engaged many of the same people, that unveiled positive relationships. These sessions were about reconciling people’s dreams with what the land itself wants us to ‘think’, ‘be’, and ‘do’. Participants expressed their emotions while others offered them support, but the most energising thing is that they started relating their dreams to the cooperative land-stewardship initiative we are co-creating.
We had designed an activity, using fruits and vegetables as lenses to help people speak about themselves, their lives, their hopes etc. We chose not to use this activity in the first round of activities, as we tested the waters: our facilitator felt that people wouldn’t understand this method. But then in the second round we used it and it was exciting hearing people talking about taste, texture, smell and other details to describe their life.