Quality of urban space is a vital aspect of urban development. CoRE Awards Kenya’s Young Achievers’ Competition is a trial to enhance the quality and diversity of urban spaces in the country, and also an important approach to achieve effective urban regeneration in the redevelopment process.
The competition, which kicked off on 22nd September 2018, aims at creating an affordable and sustainable master plan that achieves design excellence in at least 90% of the Kenyan wards. Over a period of 20 weeks they shall be challenged with developing a ward infrastructural plan that maximizes social impact, minimizes environmental damage, optimizes public revenue and ensures an investors’ return.
This competition will aim to alter the traditional way of urban planning that follows the logic of top-bottom, considering from macro-scale to micro-scale. It champions a new thought of people-oriented humanistic planning through a ‘trivial-to-grand’ mechanism, which is expected to make a remedy and complement for the traditional urban planning of macroscopic narrative.
In the forthcoming competition involving over 130 students from four universities in Kenya, the winners will be those providing their residents a better quality of life. This competition is a new way to make the public space diverse and interesting through directly intervening in the specific built environments instead of huge landscape axis, large scale landscape nodes, to complement the insufficient research and design on micro spaces in cities.
There area variety of design guidelines for participants to choose. Public spaces where daily life of citizens and tourists occur, such as town square plaza, block,roadside green space, bathing beach, public toilets and food markets can be designed into artistic installations, street furniture & installations and landscape scene. Some guidelines to consider already being considered include:
- Overall character of the city should be defined through the use of a consistent design concept.
- The design should be consistent with the defined architectural style and should incorporate the architectural embellishments commonly associated with that style.
- Incorporation of environmentally sustainable features.
- Natural climate control features
- Efficient, functional and creative design of the spaces.
- Visual and physical connection between private and public space should be maintained to encourage natural surveillance while creating separation between different zoning areas
- Creation of usable and open spaces.
- Integration of natural topography.
- Inclusion of landmarks and monuments with historical and tradition values to the Kenyan citizens.
- Common outdoor gathering areas should incorporate a mix of active and passive amenities.
- Appropriate signage should be incorporated in the overall city layout to enhance safety and communal living.
- Utilities reticulation and positioning.
- We wish all the students success in the competition!
We wish all the students success in the competition!
