Earlier this year I wrote about an innovative, crowd based project launching in Haiti to try and tackle the housing crisis in the country after the earthquake a few years ago destroyed much of the existing housing stock.

The project, called New Story, is a Haiti based non-profit that is applying crowdfunding to try and help restore the housing stock in the country.

Each new house costs in the region of $6,000, and the platform is turning to the crowd to help families raise the funds directly to finance such a construction.

The platform has teamed up with the charity Mission of Hope, who are helping to locate families in need of support.  These families are then helped with setting up a crowdfunding campaign.

Potential donors can research the family’s story and see how their money will contribute to the construction of the house, with a detailed breakdown of how much will be spent on various aspects of the construction.

Participatory design

A project being run in Nairobi by a team of Cambridge researchers is working along similar lines.  The project is part of the UN-Habitat program and they are applying the principles of participatory design to get the local community involved in the construction of a new center for the town of Mathare.

“The aim of participatory design is not to change the rich culture that already exists in Mathare, but rather to understand it deeply enough to design a space that is useful to and reflective of the community,” the researchers say.

The town currently has a center with a capacity of around 100 for the 120,000 or so residents of Mathare, so it’s clear that something needed to be done.

The idea is for a series of replicable units to be built so that the residents can build the site themselves, albeit with a small amount of training.  The residents also played a major role in the design of each unit, with the whole community involved in the process to ensure that the center fully reflected the needs of locals.

“The women who participated in the focus group commented that this was the first time they had been specifically asked for their input in the design process of a community construction project,” the team say.

A sustainable approach

They say that early and frequent involvement of the community during the design and construction is crucial to ensure that the facility is maintained and used by the community long after the developers have left the scene.

The initial feedback is that the project has been successful, with residents supportive and engaged in the consultation sessions.  The project team are confident therefore that the community will continue to take ownership of the facility as it nears completion.

The project team, meanwhile, hope to apply the participatory design principle to future projects.  Check out the video below to learn more about how the Mathare community center has come about.