Community Enfranchisement: The Mitigation and Dissolution of Slum Density

As new theories and proposals for planning and urban design evolve, we are increasingly aware of "pre-emptive" urban interventions that can restrict or limit future growth. Instead, new planning strategies must work towards encouraging an architecture that is limitless in its capacity for use and reuse and pronounced in its greater urban potential. Recognizing the developmental promise of this type of design is arguably the most effective way of inducing substantive and enduring change in contracting communities, and latent within proposals of all scales ought to be an aggressive pursuit for the discovery of the emergence potential in both form and program.

In the diagram above, two sites are identified as promising intervention zones in Nairobi, both equi-distant from the downtown, and Dandori (the continent's largest garbage dump). If effective program is embodied in sustainable structure in the prescribed zones, these areas will become engaged by both formal and informal urban activity, and could induce a convectional form of development, potentially aiding in the enfranchisement of the marginalized slum districts within the city. In the diagram below, the mitigation of official slum districts in Nairobi is predicted by interpolating the number of districts that stand to be affected by the subsequent development that will circumscribe the intervention site.

The location and proximities of the intervention sites are specified in the model below, along with the locations and proximities of the variously zoned districts of Nairobi to each other, and to Dandori. By strategically programming and building in the specified zones, putative development is given an opportunity to grow in a predictable fashion while encouraging district integration and even potentially reducing the prevalence and density of slum districts.