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This blog post is written by Professor Emily Wade, Landscape architect Nupur Prothi and Associate Professor Maria Kylin, Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management in Alnarp.

Kenyan teachers visiting Alnarp. Photo: Emily Wade

An ongoing, unique collaboration between Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) Alnarp and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) Nairobi started out as an exploration of student’s innovative ideas related to spatial design/solutions addressing global challenges with local site specific actions.

A collaborative model between the departments of Landscape architecture in Alnarp and Nairobi was created with an aim to contribute to the Student competition set up in affiliation with the World Congress of International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) to be held simultaneously in Stockholm and Nairobi in September 2023. The Swedish part of the course is now well on its way into the final stretch. In this Blog mini-series we want to share some of the insights and highlights of this unique collaboration, as faculty and students of SLU.

How do we understand the scales of “Global” and “Local”?

Our action within our local communities and context eventually impacts resilience at a global scale. For example, the resources we use, and our daily lifestyle ultimately have global consequences. These lifestyles are conditioned by, as well as impacted by landscape design and solutions, which in different ways can enable or constrain ways of living. At the same time, global and transnational political agendas such as Agenda 2030 or the UN Convention of Children’s Rights (CCR) affect the local practice of landscape planning and design. How we empower the young generation, will most likely effect their decisions in the future. The inter-dependencies between the local and global becomes tangible when we collaborate on a sites shrouded in similar challenges. To create a resilient and sustainable future for all life on earth, planning and design of landscapes requires to embed local site-specific knowledge within a larger understanding of their global effects.

How do we concretize this in a course?

To demonstrate this through the course we constructed a possibility for the students to work with and compare two sites, one in Kenya and one in Sweden. Both sites face challenges related to water management but in distinct social, political, and climatological contexts. How do we interact with local context, understand spatial processes and handle local politics? These are a few of the challenges that are addressed in this course preparing the students for working cross-equatorially in their future career.

The sites chosen are Nyhamnen in Malmö and Nairobi dam. Nyhamnen is a former harbour area claimed from the sea with vast areas of hardscape and quays. This has been a place of departure and arrival, still harbouring structures for connecting the land and the ocean. The city of Malmö is now planning to extend the city on to the site, embracing the diversity of Malmö and making space for social and biological processes that will colonize the area.  Nairobi dam, is an artificially constructed reservoir to capture water for the urban elite also offering this strata, recreational opportunities of sailing etc. A few decades later, the expansion of an urban marginalized settlement on one of its banks has transformed Kibera into the second largest slum in Africa. Devoid of water this space today is used for urban agriculture with peripheral areas collecting solid waste and sewage form the informal settlements as well as from other parts of the city conveyed by a network of three rivers.

Kenyan colleagues Caleb Toroitich, Hilda Omuhindi, Victor Odiwa and Caroline Ofafa during their visit to Nyhamnen. Photo: Alexia Moulin

How do we solve the logistics and cooperation in the courses?

Due to the different university terms, the JKUAT course started in January ending in April, where the students began with the Swedish site of Nyhamnen. The SLU course began in March and ends in June. During the courses, zoom lectures and reviews between the two universities has been held frequently. These digital meetings was complemented with IRL tutoring when two teachers from Sweden, Emily Wade and Nupur Prothi visited Kenya in March. They were able to meet the students at JKUAT and discuss their inspiring work on the Swedish site. This was also an opportunity to connect with JKUAT faculty and visit the site and meet Landscape Architects who were working within Kibera.

The Swedish part of the Master’s course started in the middle of March with a week’s visit from two Kenyan faculty members Caleb Toroitich and Caroline Ofafa, and two students Hilda Omuhindi and Victors Odiwa. In an extremely intense week we got to know the Kenyan site through lectures and movies from the site delivered by our Kenyan colleagues. We were able to take them to visit the Nyhamnen site in Malmö. Our Swedish students got to discuss and give feedback to the visiting Kenyan students on their proposals for Nyhamnen. Most importantly, the conversations and discussions strengthened mutual respect, laying the foundation for future collaborations.

What are the insights so far?

One of the important insights is that the education system in both countries have many similarities with a similar manner of teaching, design and practice of the landscape architecture profession. Early in our digital interactions, where we as SLU tutors reviewed the JKUAT students’ work in progress, we discovered that their analysis, sketches and proposals follow similar methodology and focus as our students. Our educational systems are also structured similarly at bachelor’s level even though the Kenyan education is younger than the Swedish program, which recently celebrated 50 years.

We do talk about the same global challenges, but site specific tangible problems are mostly very different. Multiplicity of cultures, dense urban populations, economic divides and a vibrant equatorial culture contrast somewhat with a Nordic population in a temperate and arctic landscape with low population pressure, abundance of open public space and ample natural resources.

This blog post is the first one in a series of four blog posts from the Master’s course Act Local, Think Global given by SLU and JKUAT Nairobi.

This blog post is written by Alex Weisend, Alexia Moulin and Sara Saleh, students at the MSc course Act Local, Think Global. 

Nairobi Dam. Photo: Emily Wade

What new perspectives on water access, use and design can be explored when collaborating with students from a country with vastly different challenges?

If there is an antithesis to a post-industrial harbour in a northern European, medium-sized town, it could, at first glance, be that of an overgrown dam in Nairobi, Kenya. It is in this economic, social, environmental, and not the least spatial contradiction that our team has approached the question of water access, use and design.

Visit in Nyhamnen, Malmö. Photo: Alexia Moulin

Nyhamnen is a constructed landfill, developed in order to expand in a growing, global industry. Nairobi dam of today reminds of a landfill, but is a consequence of political and economic circumstances with adverse environmental and social effects. Nyhamnen is an area that has been used to a limited extent by the city’s inhabitants, whilst Nairobi dam borders to, and is to a large extent integrated in, Kibera, the second largest informal settlement in Kenya. Although both sites face challenges of pollution, Nairobi dam is subject to an accumulation of urban runoff, inadequate sewage systems and the outcomes of poor sanitation facilities carried by rivers and tributaries with a final outlet in the dam. Nyhamnen is subject to a preceding industrial pollution, and in periods of extensive rainfall, to urban runoff.

Working together with students from Nairobi has – this far – had several effects on our design thinking. Seeing the possibilities of “our” site through the eyes of the Nairobi students – and specifically through their design analyses and concepts, has challenged us in our interpretation of the site. Mitigating rising sea levels by sculpting the land into dramatic hills and valleys, as suggested by one Kenyan student, inspired us to explore unconventional design solutions. It also emphasized the urgency of the global climatic conditions and how these require critical measures. We are not only theoretically aware of this. Being prompted by students with a first-hand experience of the consequences of climate change as well as of political and economic conditions in interplay with these, reinforces our incentive to practicing it.

Nairobi dam has been subject to a range of programs and measures taken to improve the conditions of the reservoir. The obstacles that have hindered a long term and extensive development of the past waterscape are described in literature on the development of the Nairobi dam, that we have taken part of. Despite the difference in severity and scale between Nyhamnen and Nairobi dam, there are lessons to be learnt in implementing improvement measures in the case of the urban transformation of Nyhamnen too. In terms of water access, use and design, one of the obstacles of the Nairobi dam experience has been that the extent of the defined extent of the project and the site has been too small-scale. Without engaging the local community, taking into consideration climate change, pollutants along the watercourse and economic circumstances affecting the use and misuse of the water, programs for treating the water risk being carried out in vain. The fluid character of water imposes on us a global perspective, in Nairobi dam as well as in Nyhamnen.

Act local, think global is as much the name of this class and a subtheme in the IFLA of 2023 as it is a method for learning from dramatically contrasting circumstances and applying them to our local conditions. An antithesis can also be a design tool that reveals a global parallel.

This blog post is the second one in a series of four blog posts from the Master’s course Act Local, Think Global given by SLU and JKUAT Nairobi.

This blog post is written by Brianna Bergström & Joel Talje, students at the MSc course Act Local, Think Global. 

Nyhamnen, Malmö. Photo: Alexia Moulin 

Student project of Nyhamnen

The repurposing of the former industrial harbour district Nyhamnen in Malmö will give space for and enable many purposes for the city. The coastal line and water will be accessible for the general public, enabling spaces for recreation and leisure. The amount of available space is also important regarding the demand on housing and Malmö City’s goal of densification. Access to the area and remnants of the harbour industry is also an important part of the city’s heritage and identity. There are also challenges with these possibilities. Envisioning how the new city district will function and be shaped by social life can be difficult. It therefore becomes necessary to think of how to activate a space rather than only imagining a static vision of what the new district should be. A big part of this challenge is to understand what qualities the space currently contains and designing with undiscovered potentials in mind.

SLU and Architects Sweden visits JKUAT. Photo: Emily Wade

Kibera public space project

The situations and projects of Kibera are vastly different from any situation in Nyhamnen, though the underlying ideas of community driven processes are inspiring for the urban development and activation of public spaces in Nyhamnen. It is not only the commonality that is relevant, but the differences in approaches which can be thought provoking in a necessary way. In KDI’s public space projects, multi functionality has been a big focus. Combined use of public space to work with sanitation, management of crime and availability of drinking water. Also engaging with social and economical challenges when working with climate related issues is helpful in creating solutions that are sustainable on more than one level. Even though much might be different from Nyhamnen, the question of multifunctionality in an increasingly dense environment is just as relevant in Malmö and many other cities.

Kibera is mentioned to have a strong social fabric and sense of community activism, giving community driven processes much potential. This strength in community and enabling of bottom up movements is something that sometimes is missing in large developments such as Nyhamnen. Bottom up movements aren’t unique to Kibera, but the demanding environment of Kibera also requires community structures and engagement. Highlighting the importance of the people being able to have their voices heard. This can also function as a reminder of core values that if not valued and protected could be overlooked in a seemingly well thought out and well functioning system.

Act local, Think global

The completely different preconditions of Nairobi and more specifically Kibera, demands a different approach to solving issues than what is praxis in Malmö. This highlights the value of acting local and thinking global, as different local contexts allow or even demand different approaches. As issues relate to human and ecological themes always are a common denominator for people and cities. The local perspective can help influence new ways of thinking, understanding complexities and to come up with new solutions.

This blog post is the third one in a series of four blog posts from the Master’s course Act Local, Think Global given by SLU and JKUAT Nairobi.

This blog post is written by  Aleksandra Arent at the MSc course Act Local, Think Global.

Landscape Architects faces many challenges. Photo: Emily Wade

Food security is one of the most pressing issues of our time. In Kibera, an informal settlement in Nairobi, some people spend even 80% of their income on imported food, some eat meals provided by the NGOs operating within the settlement, and others engage in the practices of local urban agriculture. The dominating practices are growing kale in sacks, corn in unbuilt spaces and cultivating arrow root directly in the Nairobi Dam which comes with many health hazards (Gallaher et al., 2013). The water in Nairobi Dam is highly polluted and deemed unsuitable for human and animal consumption (Mandela, 2016). However, due to the unavailability of good quality local farmland accessible to the urban poor, the people of Kibera are forced to consume the toxic aro roots. Yet, just North of the settlement there lies a vast, irrigated Royal Golf Club sized around 80 ha containing grass monocultures and patches of woodland. The golf course is one of the sites left from the era of British colonialism and bears the symbolism of the extreme social inequalities persisting since that period, which drive the internal and cross-border migrations today.

Kibera has a constant inflow of inhabitants, fleeing from the rural areas in search of better employment opportunities in Nairobi. Currently, it has around 800 000 dwellers and is one of 200 informal settlements hosting a total of about 2 500 000 people within the capital, which makes up 60% of the city’s population. The question arises: why do people in Kenya leave their rural dwellings to live in these dense settlements with very low access to food and barely any land available for cultivation? What drives food insecurity in the rural parts of the country? Following Walden Bello (2009), one of the answers lies in the structural adjustment programme in the 1980s encouraged by the World Bank and incorporated into policy-making in exchange for 1 billion USD of loans given to various African countries (Federici and Achebe, 2001). This has led to the dismantling of state support for farming and the inadequate takeover of public institutions by the private sector. That ultimately enhanced the favouritism of commercial large-scale food producers leaving smallholders with no means of support. Bello also underlined the disadvantageous export rates to the EU and the USA, making the African farmers deprived of public subsidies to compete with European and US markets with their food prices paradoxically lowered by governmental financial support. The threat of food insecurity and financial ruin of the African smallholder farmers is partially linked to the prioritisation of production for export to finance the ever-growing foreign debts. Finally, the World Bank’s vision for the development of the continent’s agriculture is a further expansion of corporate agriculture alongside the preservation of traditional practices in ‘reserves’ (Bello, 2009), which will lead to further displacement of rural communities to urban settlements.

From this brief analysis, we arrive back in Kibera and the need for a rethinking of urban agriculture, which is still perceived by the decision-makers as a sign of importing rural backwardness to the cities. Yet, is not a matter of choice in the growing dominance of large-scale export crop monocultures outside the urban areas. The inability of rural landscapes to provide livelihoods to their inhabitants puts even more pressure on rational land use within the cities and making space for efficient and varied local food production. It also emphasises the irrelevance of the 80-ha golf course serving the capitalist elites with its enclosed irrigated vegetation bordering an informal settlement of 800 000 people doomed to eat toxic arrow roots from the Nairobi Dam polluted with sewage, rubbish and pharmaceuticals.

 

References:

Bello, W. (2009). The Debt Crisis, Africa, and the New Enclosures. In: The Food Wars. Verso.

Federici, S. and Achebe, C. (2001). The Debt crisis, Africa and the new enclosures.

Gallaher, C.M., Kerr, J.M., Njenga, M., Karanja, N.K. and WinklerPrins, A.M.G.A. (2013). Urban agriculture, social capital, and food security in the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya. Agriculture and Human Values, [online] 30(3), pp.389–404. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9425-y.

Mandela, O. (2016). Management strategies for restoration of Nairobi Dam. [online]

Available at: http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke/bitstream/handle/11295/153080/Mandela_Management%20Strategies%20For%20Restoration%20Of%20Nairobi%20Dam.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

This blog post is the fourth one in a series of four blog posts from the Master’s course Act Local, Think Global given by SLU and JKUAT Nairobi.

This blog post is written by Carolina Åkerlund, a MSc student from the Department of Aquatic Resources at SLU, during a field trip to Mozambique October to December 2022.

Fishers gathered at a landing site on Sitone beach on Bazaruto Island after a day of fishing. Photo: Charlotte Berkström

In October last year, I travelled to Mozambique with another Master’s student, Amanda Rydhem, to conduct fieldwork in the beautiful Bazaruto Archipelago as part of our Master’s work. We got the chance to experience stunning environments and meet wonderful people in a setting very different from Sweden. We also got the opportunity to collaborate and work with local scientists, students and NGOs, participating in capacity building of marine science in the region. Our thesis work focuses on exploring small-scale fisheries within the national park of the Bazaruto Archipelago. 

Why work with small-scale fisheries?

Small-scale fisheries contribute to the livelihoods of millions of people in developing countries, being a key contribution to food security and income. In the Bazaruto Archipelago National Park, many people are highly dependent on small-scale fisheries for their subsistence. The area’s high marine biodiversity and occurrence of charismatic fauna, including sea turtles, several species of sharks, dolphins and East Africa’s only viable population of dugongs, led to the creation of the Bazaruto Archipelago national park in the 1970s. A common feature of the shallow seascape in Bazaruto is the seagrass that forms lush meadows which are important habitats for fish and crustaceans etc. Due to the park’s protection of certain areas, including coral reefs, most of the small-scale fisheries are practised in and around seagrass habitats. They serve as key fishing grounds, and many of them have local names. Lack of fertile soil on the islands limits agriculture, and this together with a steadily increasing population and few alternative livelihood options increases the pressure on the seagrass fish community. Decreasing catches within the park have raised concerns regarding sustainability and the future of the seagrass fisheries.

One of the targeted species, carapau (Decapterus spp), caught in the tidal channels close to the seagrass meadows. Photo: Charlotte Berkström

Managing small-scale fisheries is in many cases challenging due to complex social-ecological interactions and small-scale fisheries target a variety of species using a range of gears. These fisheries are also generally data poor, which makes it difficult to make informed decisions about proper management measures. Measures often include gear restrictions and seasonal and/or temporal closures. To study small-scale fisheries management within the Bazaruto Archipelago national park, we joined a group of scientists and students from five universities in Sweden, Mozambique and Brazil to take a closer look at the seagrass habitats and collect spatial, ecological and socio-ecological data.

How did you become familiar with the environment and the techniques needed for data collection?

The project started with a weeklong workshop in Bazaruto Island to get familiar with the diverse marine habitats, and together discuss and practise the different methods to be used in the upcoming fieldwork. The team practised snorkel techniques, fish- and seagrass identification, and survey methods as part of capacity building of marine science in Mozambique.

Students from Sweden and Mozambique practising data collection of fish and seagrass. Photo: Carolina Åkerlund

What did you do during your stay?

Nevertheless, all good things must come to an end, and so do educational and rewarding workshops. After an intense week of learning, we stayed on another eight weeks to conduct fieldwork. During these weeks, we spent time both under and above the sea surface and a variety of ecological and socio-ecological methods were used to get an overview of the seagrass  and small-scale fisheries in the park.

Not all days doing fieldwork are sunshine and calm seas. Photo: Amanda Rydhem

Fish communities were surveyed using two different methods: 1) underwater visual census (UVCs), where all fish within a certain predefined area were identified and counted during low tide and 2) deployment of GoPro cameras to identify and count fish during high tide.

Preparing GoPro cameras before deployment. Photo: Charlotte Berkström

Together with representatives from the Bazaruto Archipelago national park and Mozambican university students, we conducted interviews with fishers in three villages in the northern most parts of Bazaruto Island. The aim with the interviews was to gain knowledge on important seagrass areas for fisheries, fishing effort, targeted species, preferred fishing grounds, and local ecological knowledge concerning habitat use and connectivity for some of the targeted species.

A fisherwoman with vast fishing experience being interviewed in Sitone village, Bazaruto Island. Photo: Santos Mutondo

Our thesis work is part of a larger project in collaboration with researchers, students and park representatives from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Stockholm University, Federal University of Santa Maria,Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Universidade Pedagogica and the Bazaruto Archipelago National Park. Information gathered within the frames of this project will contribute to an increased understanding of fish communities of tropical nearshore ecosystems; how these are affected by environmental factors and by fishing pressure related to the UN Sustainable goals (SDGs) 13 (Climate action) and 14 (Life below water). Knowledge of how these factors are interacting in shaping the seagrass fish communities and how certain species may respond differently will be helpful within management efforts aiming to develop sustainable small-scale fisheries, providing food security (SDG 2), boosting social and ecological resilience and reducing poverty (SDG 1).

A sundowner together on the beach is the perfect way to end a day of fieldwork. Photo: Carolina Åkerlund

For more info see: Joint efforts in studying Mozambique’s important seagrass beds by Swedish and local students | Externwebben (slu.se)

The Mozambique project is part of  SLU Aqua’s international development cooperation