Reflections

Hafsa Siddique, Architectural Designer

"Oh my God, what is going on today!" —

exclaimed a little girl, peering down at us as we climbed the last leg to the rooftop, eight floors up, into a little crowd of children playing and chatting away, the rooftop view — another block. 

The ascent through the blocks, despite the blinding sunlight outside, led us through dark 'by-passes' — spaces that transform into income-generating shortcuts past 10pm with small stores and salons carved into the walls, pitch black staircase cores of uneven risers, where the location of the step felt uncertain, and corridors with each flight to the top letting one extra shade of distant light, fighting its way to the ground. 

Outside each home, stacks of three to five levels of jerry cans lined the walls, further narrowing the passageways, a quiet but urgent signal of irregular access to water. 

Children raced up and down the passages, eyes perhaps now adapted to the darkness, navigating a floor print of roughly 28m x 8m with floor to floor heights at staircase landings no more than 2.2m, spaces where the body adjusts as much as the eye. 

Women washed clothes in basins along the corridors drawing back water on the floor that flowed beyond an invisible boundary known only to the inhabitants. Lightwells, though present, did little beyond present a need of steel balustrades, strung from one end to the other with lines of drying laundry, already full.

Stepping outside, blocks stretched into continuous vertical walls featuring multiple façade treatments, animated by balconies that introduced a rhythm — dynamic, yet repetitive. Laundry remained the most vivid expression of the lives within: colourful layers of clothing stretched across buildings, often in multiple tiers, revealing density and occupation. The manner in which clothes were hung revealed ingenuity where trousers pegged at the hems allowed for the heaviest part (the waist) to hang downward, using gravity to drain water faster.

Despite clear skies, translucent plastic sheets covered parts of the hanging laundry. On the road below — at times muddy, strewn with rubbish, and barely passable — the reason became evident: water dripping from freshly washed clothes fell onto pedestrians and onto the layers of laundry extending from the floors below.  

A visit to Pipeline stays with you.

The risks are undeniable, but so are the adaptations.

What emerges here is not just density, but a spatial system shaped by scarcity, yet one where sometimes the risks cannot be left to adaptation alone.

Juliet Ayieta, Kenya Red Cross Society

Urban risk in informal settlements is increasingly systemic, interconnected, and health-driven, requiring integrated and community-centered responses.

Health outcomes, particularly non-communicable diseases (respiratory illnesses, mental health) highlight deeper structural challenges linked to poor waste management, inadequate drainage, and environmental exposure. These should be understood as indicators of systemic vulnerability, not isolated issues.

Risks are mutually reinforcing, with infrastructure, environmental, and social factors compounding impacts (e.g. drainage failures leading to flooding and disease outbreaks, or illegal electricity connections increasing fire risk). This underscores the need for multi-sectoral approaches to urban resilience.

Strengthening community cohesion emerged as critical, including:

• Targeted stakeholder engagement

• Youth empowerment

• Addressing GBV and security concerns

• Supporting community leadership and champions

• Resilience is therefore both a technical and social process.

There is also a clear need to strengthen governance linkages, including:

• Improved community understanding of government systems

• Stronger connections to decision-making processes

• Support to policy review and feedback mechanisms

Organizations such as Kounkuey Design Initiative play a key role in bridging community knowledge and policy frameworks.

Key takeaway:

Addressing systemic urban risk requires a shift from reactive responses to anticipatory, integrated, and equity-centered resilience approaches, grounded in community knowledge and practice.

The conversation culminated with the Director of Disaster and Risk Management talking about the pilot community emergency response teams yet to be trained and deployed in all 17 sub-counties and 85 wards as first responders to incidents occurring in dense settlements such as Pipeline. The recruitment of these teams will be done through the National Government Administrative Officers. 

The Director also talked about the multilevel and multistakeholder engagement being convened by the National Disaster Operation Centre to ensure coordinated collective disaster preparedness and response by government and non-governmental agencies. These interventions provide an opportunity to work with citizen scientists to pilot practical steps on how residents and county government engage in response to risk. They are also a platform to explore the role of citizen science in understanding how systemic risks compound and cascade.

The discussants call to action was for citizens to become more active in policy and intervention processes. Regina Opondo of KDI proposed practice, policy and community action, including: 

• Embedding citizen science into everyday community organizing so that communities use data and their voice as power. 

• Pushing for systemic risk to be a policy priority and an election agenda in the manifesto.

• Mobilize residents to use their voice to shape policies and interventions.

Juilet Ayieta of the Kenya Red Cross called on residents to engage in the existing processes of disaster preparedness and response through organizing themselves for trainings on first and other emergency response trainings done by the county department and Red Cross. She also emphasized the critical role of active citizenry in ensuring public safety in settlements by reducing vulnerability to disasters and informing better disaster response and preparedness through policy review to address the implementation and enforcement gaps.