Paper presented at The Future of Humanitarian Design Symposium,
HEAD-Geneva,
May 13-14, 2024.
HEAD-Geneva,
May 13-14, 2024.
The 1970s was a decade of development. As the newly independent African states were looking to rebuild their state infrastructures, they reached out to new partners seemingly untainted by the colonial past. Countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway led this effort internationally, administering nearly 1% of their GDP in “focus countries”—Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia—through bilateral aid agreements. This aid often materialised in humanitarian design projects focused on education, healthcare or housing—a profile which contributed to creating the idea of the North based on “common goodwill.” For the Nordics, this was an opportunity to solidify their soft power in the region and, following the tradition of the protestant missionaries, do “good” by transferring ideas, knowledge and money. Beyond social aspirations, humanitarian projects meant good business: Nordic commercial actors created a parallel infrastructure in the region at the service of humanitarian design projects. Norwegian architects, Danish interior designers and Swedish engineers opened prosperous design offices in Nairobi, Dar-es-Salaam and Lusaka, and global consultancies like Sweco, Norconsult, and White found themselves in the sweet spot between international donor organisations and national state actors.
Through specific case studies of Nordic humanitarian design projects in East Africa, the project proposes to trace the invisible commercial infrastructures created in parallel to the humanitarian design ventures. Drawing from original archival sources, the paper dissects the power dynamics between those who designed and those who were designed for. In doing so, it argues that pragmatic lessons from Nordic humanitarian design projects offer a particularly fruitful entry point to address the imposed contemporary imbalances between the Global South and the Global North.