The Dandora Community Development Project

After the independence of Kenya in 1963, the city of Nairobi was still based on the inherited colonial spatial and racial segregation dating back to its first town plan in 1899. Postcolonial Nairobi was overwhelmed by the rapid influx of African immigrants. As a result, the city‘s boundaries were extended, and the number of new settlers multiplied. In 1973, the Nairobi Metropolitan Growth Strategy was an urban effort to confront the functional division of the city by proposing integrated, self-contained metropolitan neighborhoods. This strategy led to the birth of The Dandora Community Development Project – the first sites-and-services project in South-East Africa.

In collaboration with the World Bank and the UN, local government organizations initiated the large-scale development project. Because it was the first of its kind, it had an experimental approach and was meant to serve as a pioneering model that could – based on the results drawn from its execution – be adapted for future projects. However, lack of coordination and cooperation amongst various departments and committees and interference by council members and departments finally led to delays and cost increases. Nevertheless, after its completion, the project was generally viewed as a success.

The site underwent many changes in the fifty years of the Dandora Community Development Project. While areas 1–5, as well as the central spine, were built in the 1970s and 1980s, the implementation of area 6 never took place. This area took on a life of its own and transformed into what we today know as the primary municipal solid waste dump for Nairobi. This has had a significant adverse effect on the health of the residents of Dandora and other neighboring communities. Dandora suffers from air pollution due to toxic waste spreading through the air and the burning of garbage, causing skin diseases, etc.

Furthermore, the lack of food forces people to search for nutrition at the dump site. Crime and unemployment rates are high, and many children have no access to education. On the other hand, the dumpsite creates many jobs, and even though its existence has a lot of harmful impacts, it cannot be removed without consequences.

Projects such as ‘Dandora Placemaking’, run by the Citilinks Africa Group in collaboration with local experts, community groups, academics, UN-Habitat, and NGOs, are working on strategies and models to upgrade Dandora. Its main goals are ‘(…) safe, inclusive and green public spaces for women, children and the elderly and the disabled’, as well as ‘creating safer and sustainable communities that provide opportunities for all’.¹

The Dandora Community Development Project site contains 6,000 plots with a density of 32 plots per hectare, each housing ten people. The biggest plots were built to subsidize the cheapest ones. Three options of wet core plots were available, in three different sizes and with a differing amount of already built rooms, from only the wet core up to 4 fully built rooms. Nowadays in most of the plots, the core kitchens have been transformed into rooms because of lack of space, the preference for private/outdoor cooking, and to earn more rent money for the owners. The wet core is still the main encounter point. Some plot boundaries have been modified, taking portions of neighboring plots: the residents thus provide themselves with a second room. In single-room houses, residents have incorporated soft partitions to divide the space. A micro-neighborhood feeling appears in a plot, as different tenants occupy each room. Their relationship impacts the quality and maintenance of the shared spaces.

Cited Sources

1. Citilinks. “Dandora Placemaking.” Accessed 1 Dec. 2022.

Further Sources

1. ETH Studio Basel, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Nairobi, Kenya – Migration Shaping the City. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers. 2014.

2. Lee-Smith, D. and P.A. Memon. “Institution Development for Delivery of Low-Income Housing. An Evaluation of The Dandora Community Development Project in Nairobi.” Third World Planning Review, vol. 10, no. 3. 1988.

3. Mbugua, Mungai Julius. Towards Improving Provision and Management of Road Infrastructure in Urban Site and Service Schemes: Case Study of Dandora – Nairobi. Nairobi: University of Nairobi. 2008.

4. “Dandora.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandora (last consulted 1.12.22).

5. Soni, Praful. On Self-Help in a Site and Services Project in Kenya. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1980.

6. Ivanovic, Glen Wash and Junko Tamura. “Core–housing and Collaborative Architecture: Learning from Dandora.” Proceedings ARCC 2015 Conference, Chicago.

Images

1. Evolution of Typologies of the Urban Fabric of Dandora. Own work, based on plans from the texts cited above and photographs below.

2. Masterplan Dandora, by Mutiso Menezes International. Source: Mutiso Menezes International’s archives. From: Loeckx, André and Bruce Githua. “Sites-and-Services in Nairobi (1973-1987).” In Human Settlements. Formulations and (Re)Calibrations, ed. by Viviana d’Auria, Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon. Amsterdam: SUN Academia. 2010.

3. Actors involved in The Dandora Community Development Project. Source: Own work.

4. Plots facing the dumpsite. Source: Facebook page of Dandora PHASE 4 Community, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/phase4community/

5. An average completed dwelling, as documented by Praful Naran Soni. Source: Soni, Praful. On Self-Help in a Site and Services Project in Kenya. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1980.

6. Map of Gated Community. Source:  Own work, based on: Ivanovic, Glen Wash and Junko Tamura. “Core–housing and Collaborative Architecture: Learning from Dandora.” Proceedings ARCC 2015 Conference, Chicago.