Productive Public Space: Exploring Hybridities in Informal Settlements
New York Prize Fellows Chelina Odbert and Jennifer Toy
Reception and Presentation
Thursday, April 10, 2008
7:00 - 9:00pm
at Van Alen Institute
30 West 22nd Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10010
212-924-7000
Van Alen Institute is pleased to announce a reception for New York Prize Fellows Chelina Odbert and Jennifer Toy. Their project, "Productive Public Space: Exploring Hybridities in Informal Settlements," explores alternative models for poverty alleviation, quality of life improvement, and environmental remediation through the production of public space in slums.
Odbert and Toy, founding members of the Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), have spent over two years working with community members in the slum of Kibera, Nairobi, to design and implement the concept of productive public space—an open space, created in collaboration with its client community, that links physical improvements to self sustaining micro-enterprise activities. Home to between 700,000 and 1,000,000 residents, Kibera is the largest informal settlement in Sub-Saharan Africa yet it occupies a space just two-thirds the size of New York City's Central Park. KDI's efforts in Kibera include development of youth employment opportunities, trash collection, and flood prevention along the wide, debris covered banks of polluted rivers that cut through the settlement.
A reception will be held on Thursday, April 10, 2008 from 7:00-9:00pm, featuring visual materials about KDI's ongoing work in Kibera and a presentation by Odbert and Toy about the opportunities and challenges facing designers who work in informal settlements or low-income areas. This program is free and open to the public.
During their New York Prize Fellowship term at Van Alen Institute, Odbert and Toy organized a series of roundtables with a wide range of professionals—architects, planners, economists, environmental experts, funders, public health practitioners and policy makers—to critically explore the significance of public space in informal settlements. Among the institutions represented at the discussions were Acumen Fund, the Blacksmith Institute, Buro Happold, the Center for Sustainable Urban Development, Design Trust for Public Space, Great Eastern Ecology, Malkenson Foundation, Metropolis, Peter L. Gluck & Partners, Project for Public Spaces, Sustainable South Bronx, Urban Think Tank, TILL Design, WRT Design and more. The roundtable conversations served to generate a collective definition of 'productive public space' and a working model of its forms, uses and applicable contexts both nationally and internationally.
As a culmination of these conversations, and as a public statement about KDI's community-driven processes of definition and design, Odbert and Toy additionally commissioned a select group of artists and graphic designers to create poster series that illustrate and advance new ways of thinking about public space in informal settlements and low-income areas. Contributing artists include Jenny Beorkrem of Ork Posters (Chicago, IL), Prem Krishnamurthy and Adam Michaels of Project Projects (New York, NY), Leah Murphy (Philadelphia, PA) and Mindy Watts (Philadelphia, PA). The posters will be reproduced and distributed throughout Nairobi, New York and other major cities as part of an awareness campaign this summer; the originals, which range in media from woodcut to newsprint to silkscreen, will be on view at Van Alen Institute from Thursday, April 10 to Friday, April 25, 2008.
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