Paper for SAH 2025 Atlanta, Georgia,
April 30-May 4 2025.
April 30-May 4 2025.
In the Spring of 1967, heated negotiations were underway about establishing a new research institution—the Housing Research and Development Unit at the University College of Nairobi. The pilot Unit was to engage with pressing housing issues in urban and rural areas in Kenya and East Africa and provide the government of Kenya with practical recommendations on how to deal with these social, economic, and architectural problems. Together with the Central Housing Board and the National Construction Corporation, the Unit’s researchers experimented with prototype housing designs, tested building systems and new materials, and produced recommendations and building manuals for housing and community organisations. Initially funded by the UN Special Fund and several Nordic and Dutch national aid agencies, the Unit attracted an international team of scholars comprised of Kenyan architects and sociologists, British planners, and Nordic and Dutch economists. This international and interdisciplinary set-up reflected the ambition to provide applied research rooted in the day-to-day realities of Kenyan planning. The research was consolidated into numerous publications and manuals on housing, cooperative development, new building techniques, technologies and construction materials. Over four decades, the Unit has educated several generations of planners, researchers, and architects from Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia and provided the foundation for the UN-Habitat research agenda, while its manuals informed construction across the Global South.
Based on a close reading of the Unit’s original archival documents and building manuals, located today at the University of Nairobi, this paper aims to dissect how the geographic perspective of this institution and its peculiar South-to-South orientation permeated its research. It is particularly interested in the international amalgamation of ideas within this transnational Global South institution and asks how visions of development initially imported from the North were rethought, challenged and subverted by the on-the-ground realities of East African planning.