Kibera #000

Voices from the ghetto 0.0

My name is Matteo Perin, M.sc graduating in architecture at the Faculty of “Architettura e società” of Politecnico di Milano. This summer, thanks to the support of my tutors (Gennaro Postiglione, Salvatore Porcaro) and the help of Stefano Marras, Ph.d researcher at the Department of Sociology of “Università degli Studi di Milano”, i had the opportunity to spend two months in Nairobi, Kenya, to explore “on field” the complexity and the dynamics running in  one of the 200 informal settlements spread within the metropolitan area: Kibera, worldwide known to be the biggest slum of the Sub-Sahara African region, with a population ranging from 300.000 up to 1.000.000 people (depending on the source) packed into 2,25 sqkm, located in the south-west outskirt of the city.

For its complexity, the settlement can be seen as a snapshot of the whole Nairobi, a city where two thirds of the population is living under the poverty threshold (less than 1 U.S. dollar per day) overcrowding in  the 5% of the whole territory.  Nairobi, a city where the gap between rich and poor is getting higher and higher,  increasing segregation both at the social  as well as the physical level.

Due to its reputation, during the years, a huge number of actors (Government,local authorities, NGOs, CBOs, scholars, mass-media) “in the name of Kibera” has speculated on the settlement and  its people, most of the times more for personal and political purposes, with the result that no considerable efforts where put to improve  living conditions of dwellers that have lost any kind ofconfindence in such programs.  The clearer example to better understand the way followed by the Government , is given by the “KENSUP”, a wide National program whose objective is to eradicate the biggest slums in the Country by 2020. According to this approach the areas taken in consideration are going to be totally demolished and substituted by a piece of a “formal” city  where none of the informal dwellers couldafford to live in. Among the protests and critics, in September 2009  the process has been started in Soweto East, one of the thirteen villages composingKibera.

Looking at this panorama, in order to better understand the actual conditions/contradictions of the settlement,  my approach started directly from the bottom, going beyond number and data’s, knowing people and their stories, trying to understand  how they live and observing which are the spontaneous processes that have a positive impact within the socio-economic patterns of the villages, with the final aim to think about a possible strategy of  small scale interventions.