Violence Prevention Through Urban Upgrading (VPUU) is a non-profit based out of Cape Town that works with low income communities to build sustainable neighborhoods by tackling issues of social, economic, cultural and institutional marginalization.

The program began in the sub district of Harare in 2006, using urban planning as a crime-fighting tool to develop both small and large interventions in spots where crime rates were the highest. Those initial efforts resulted in a 20 percent decrease in violent crime between April 2008 and March 2009. The murder rate dropped 32 percent. 

Since 2013, after registering the VPUU Non Profit Company (NPC), it has served as an intermediary between the public sector and locally organized citizens, working along with them through participatory methods of engagement, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Their more recent projects include building capacity of local communities through early childhood development programs, introducing technology based solutions to collect data and report lack of services and amenities to local authorities, securing tenancy rights by building community registers and nurturing local talent through social development funds.

We had a chance to speak with Kathryn Ewing and Don Shay of VPUU on our podcast, Social Design Insights. There, they shared with us their strategies for community development, and how to make communities stronger. Listen to the episode below.

YA+K brings young architects, urban planners, and designers together around projects that question and simultaneously invest in urban planning, architecture, design, and cultural action. The collective aims to create playful and evolving situations that stem from the imaginary to reality.

YA + K is a French collective of artists and designers who seek new ways of understanding and defining public space. Their work encompasses architecture, town planning, urban gardens, interventions, workshops, and more. YA + K’s mission is to promote the understanding of communities of ways to create their own spaces. This mission coincides with a focus on material re­utilization and therefore, an affinity for public spaces, wastelands, vacant lots, etc.

The collective utilizes an experimental approach tailored to given territories and is designed as a tool for the creation of catalysts for the construction and development of cities. Regularly partnering with local actors (local authorities, associations, etc.) and artists (videographers, visual artists, etc.), the collective makes the transversality of actors and practices the common denominator of all its projects.

YA+K projects focus on low-tech, do-it-yourself innovations and the creation of new economies.  YA+K also seeks to make the tools of creation available–whether hand tools, 3D Printers, or computers–so that the local community can become involved and engaged. The ultimate ambition is that the public understands its own power to shape its environment.

YA + K identifies the public workshop as their favorite tool. Their public workshops focus on freeing people from the classical, hierarchical constraints in society. The idea is that everyone can be a designer, and everyone can be a builder. All projects and programs are unified by a commitment to the idea that all public spaces can be organically and democratically created. 

We encourage you to learn more at their website.

Yatin Pandya is the founder and executive director of Footprints E.A.R.T.H. (Environment, Architecture, Research, Technology, Housing), an Indian professional services organization focused on research, design, and promotion of more sustainable urban futures.

India produces 24.7 meganewtons of urban waste per day. This waste stream could represent an unlimited supply of new building materials, provided recyclables can be thoughtfully reused. Footprints E.A.R.T.H. uses waste such as crate packaging, plastic water bottles, glass bottles, rags, wrappers, metal scraps, compact discs, electronic hardware, and more as material to be transformed into walls, roofing,

Footprints E.A.R.T.H. is an Ahmedabad-based firm, led and driven by Pandya and his natural, sustainable, and context-centric design philosophies. From planning to material selection, their designs are context and user-oriented, while being sustainable and influenced by Indian traditions in architecture. Work developed by the firm ranges from architecture to campus planning to education, and each project becomes an educational tool in a campaign to help India think differently about its built environment. flooring, and fenestration elements. Projects of the organization thus address environmental concerns by reducing pollution and energy through the recycling of waste. In the process, impoverished people are empowered economically through the generation of economic opportunities, and their quality of life is improved through the development of affordable and durable alternative building products for their homes.

An example of the Footprints E.A.R.T.H. philosophy works in practice is the design of the Manav Sadhna Activity Centre and Creche, in Ahmedabad, India. Walls were constructed of fly ash instead of clay, which does not require firing, produces less pollution, and is cheaper than clay. Wooden crates, glass bottles, oil drums, rags, clay bowls, and even electronic waste (keyboards) were used as filler in several different applications. The project itself acts as a material palette that can be studied by locals and serve as inspiration for future projects.

We had a chance to interview Yatin on our podcast, Social Design Insights, where he shared with us the nuts and bolts of his approach. Listen to the episode below.

Plan Selva is an ambitious, innovative plan by the Peruvian Ministry of Education. It uses architecture to restore dignity to a historically relegated indigenous population by building modular schools and bringing quality education to Peru’s remote jungle regions.

The Amazon regions occupy 61% of Peru’s land, yet are inhabited by only 10% of the population. Due to a chronic lack of investment and development, children of the area have few options for schooling, heightening the historical divisions of race, class and geography. More than half the schools in the Amazonian territory need major repairs or replacement and the government actually has no data at all for 4,000 schools that lie along the border.

The goal of the Plan Selva program is to empower indigenous children to cultivate their tribal knowledge and live productively in the Amazon, leaving their culture and the forest intact. For instance, today outside scientists travel to the Amazon to tap local knowledge for medicinal cures for diseases such as cancer.  The hope is that by developing quality schools, the indigenous people themselves will become scientists and bring their knowledge of folk medicine to the world.

The Peruvian Amazon has some of the most difficult terrain in the world, and parts of this jungle are hardest to access. To ensure the school buildings would be appropriate to their conditions, a participatory design process was used. For example, each site demands individualized, adaptable design. To address this, the basis of the school designs are modular; replicable and scalable depending on the needs of a specific site. The materials take sustainability into consideration. For example, the buildings are framed in metal rather than wood to protect local resources.  Because of the remoteness of the terrain, many contractors will not work in these areas, so the Plan Selva approach has also been designed to utilize local labor and allow for self-building.

Beyond the building design, the curriculum and staffing are developed to minimize the imposition of Western standards, allowing the culture to remain as intact as possible.  Classes are taught in local languages, of which there are forty-four and government teachers are supplemented with local shaman.

Plan Selva is an example of how to address the challenge of internally neglected communities; national commitment and good design can overcome decades of disinvestment.

PICO is a multi-disciplinary design collective co-founded in 2011. Their work focuses on political interventions in popular neighborhood gathering spaces, with the belief that architecture—and the resulting structures, is not an end it in itself. The process of thinking through how people will interact with a space is just as important.

PICO focuses on projects that promote social empowerment through a democratic process for decision-making, one that allows communities to create their own urban policies and local norms through popular assembly.

They begin their process by connecting with neighborhood groups interested in development. Sites chosen for intervention are often oddly-shaped or on hillsides; areas that are neglected by conventional development schemes. Through their community-based process, PICO challenges assumptions about what can be done with territory, and what can be transformed through existing community assets.

Their practice is also heavily focused on the creative use of reclaimed materials from a variety of industries; critically examining how extraordinary spaces can be created with the ordinary.

Active members of PICO include Karina Domínguez, José Bastidas, Ana Karina Vielma, Adriano Pastorino, Bárbara Saman, Emanuel Bueno, María Isabel Ramírez, Manuel Coronel and Stevenson Piña.

Girls Garage (formerly Project H Design) is a construction and design school for girls and gender-expansive youth ages 9-18. Located in Berkeley, California, its programs range from carpentry and activist art classes to design-build programs where high school students construct full-scale architectural projects for community-based clients.

In 2008, designer Emily Pilloton-Lam had grown disenchanted by the disconnect between her architectural design work and her larger community. She launched Project H Design to create opportunities for people to engage in design that was deeply connected to real social problems.

Originally, the non-profit operated as a social design firm embedded in a public school district in rural Bertie County, North Carolina. The program, which ran until 2019 in North Carolina and then continued at REALM Charter School in Berkeley, CA, reconnected students with a sense of craft and engaged them directly in socially meaningful projects. In 2013, Pilloton began working with all-female groups in the form of a design/build summer camp program called Girls Garage. What began as an experiment teaching pre-teen girls to build and weld has grown into a total evolution of the organization into a robust year-round program for girls and gender-expansive youth ages 9-18. The organization has since formally changed its name to Girls Garage.

Girls Garage is a physical workspace and year-round program teaching carpentry, welding, architecture, engineering, and activist art through community-focused projects. The program aims to instill confidence in young people by providing them with the skills and tools to build whatever they can imagine. Students attend at no cost, and over two-thirds of them return for 3 or more years. Projects built by students include a greenhouse for a local community garden, a 500-square-foot chicken pavilion for an urban farm, sandboxes for nearby preschools, and a public parklet. Girls Garage has also published a book authored by Pilloton-Lam that includes a tool encyclopedia, stories of builder women, and project guides, and invites girls everywhere to join a movement of fearless builder girls.

We had a chance to speak with Emily and get her thoughts on how design can challenge inequality. Listen to the episodes below.

Open Source Ecology is a U.S. non-profit dedicated to creating an open-source economy through global collaboration. At the core of their work is the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS); open-source plans for fifty industrial and agricultural machines. All machines, from tractors to circuit boards, are considered fundamental to contemporary life— what would be required to create a small civilization with modern comforts. The 50 machines are modular and complementary so that they can be endlessly recombined to fit the needs of communities the world over.

Their designs for the fifty machines are open-­source and the materials are cheap and widely available. Notably, all designs are required to meet the same performance criteria as their commercial counterparts.

Marcin Jakubowski came up with the idea for OSE after he purchased a farm in Missouri and needed a tractor. This prompted Jakubowski to invent his own tractor in an open-source format. Eventually he and the early contributors to OSE produced a tractor that can be made in about four days for roughly $6,000 in parts; a typical tractor costs $25,000 to $120,000. The tractor success prompted OSE to create a list of other machines essential to civilization and begin designing them along the same lines.

OSE’s work is about autonomy and self-sufficiency. Developing communities are often hamstrung by the need for expensive equipment and patented technologies. OSE’s work puts productive power in the hands of communities themselves; they can design, build, and develop along the lines that are meaningful to them, even where resources are scarce.

BuildX Studio (formerly Orkidstudio) is a Nairobi-based architectural, engineering, and construction company creating real estate projects for positive social and environmental impact.

BuildX began as Orkidstudio, an aspiration of like-minded students at the Welsh School of Architecture that eventually evolved into a traditional non-profit. The team behind BuildX built an incredible portfolio during these years, taking care to observe & reflect on the challenges and limitations of traditional aid models. 

Since becoming a Social Design Circle Honoree in 2017, BuildX has seen a 360-degree evolution. In 2020, they kicked off the year by rebranding from Orkidstudio (an NGO) to BuildX Studio (a private limited company with a strong impact mission). The new name and visual identity are a representation of the disruptive and innovative company they strive to be. Leveraging the value they had already created, the team at BuildX shifted the point of project origination to initiate impact-driven building projects which can disrupt the entrenched and damaging systems that dictate how they construct their buildings. 

BuildX aims to design and build green buildings through exceptional human-centered design solutions that prioritize natural local resources and communities. They do so by focusing on three main concepts: Innovative, cost-effective, and human-centered design—working with clients to maximize returns and impact with purpose-built buildings; acting as both designer and builder—from visioning and concept design to the finished product—to deliver the highest standards of quality while optimizing costs and timeline; and sustainable design and construction. In addition, the studio encourages inclusive skill development; not only does each project serve its intended purpose, but the work of BuildX also has the potential to change how others build in the future.

One recent project of the studio was the ICT Education Centre (2020-2021), for which Build X studio served as the structural engineer and main contractor. The center supports local entrepreneurship and youth through ICT skills training. Located in a very remote area of Turkana, Kenya, the use of local materials and the transfer of knowledge to the locals were critical during the construction process.

Currently, the studio is working as the designer, contractor, and developer of Zima Homes, an affordable housing project set to address two key issues of the Kenyan market: limited quality affordable housing and the need for more sustainable buildings. The Zima pilot aims to be EDGE certified with about 60% embodied carbon efficiency.

Nance Klehm has been an ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, and agroecological grower for over three decades. She works to instigate change by activating existent communities and embodies a lifelong commitment to redefining the way humans coexist with Earth’s natural systems.

The oeuvre of Nance Klehm lies at the intersection of land politics and soil health. Her work as a communicator, translator, curator, translator, provocateur, and medium is internationally recognized in communities ranging from publishing to fine art, environmental activism to philosophy, growing to podcasting. She seeks to embody the ordinary enchantment of relationships between land and place, to honor and educate others on social ecology, and to bridge the gaps between the layman’s everyday activism and the theoretical practices of the academy, gallery, or studio.

Nance’s practice is organized under two structures: Spontaneous Vegetation and Social Ecologies. Through Spontaneous Vegetation, she communicates visions of the future of land and soil. She hosts a monthly podcast of the same name showcasing those whose work, like her own, merges activism and art. Her books, The Ground Rules – A Manual for Deep Mapping and Bioremediation of Soils and The Soil Keepers, bring together a decade’s-worth of interviews with leaders in soil healing and land politics. 

Social Ecologies L3C acts as an umbrella for a variety of ecological and system-regenerating projects, trainings, workshops, and consulting jobs both nationally and abroad. Social Ecologies offers soil and compost assessments, consultations in bioremediation strategies, hands-on workshops in soil health and fertility, and compost system buildouts.  

Nance’s work has received extensive national and international media coverage. Among other things, she is referenced in Leila Darwish’s Earth Repair and Sandor Katz’s The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. She won the 2012 Utne Visionary Prize and has been a two-time finalist for the Curry-Stone Design Prize. In addition, she has lectured broadly in museum and university settings with leading thinkers including Timothy Morton. Most recently, she was the subject of the independent documentary Weedeater.

Currently, Nance splits her time between Little Village–a densely packed, urban neighborhood in the heart of Chicago–where she facilitates The Soil Keepers, a 60-hour certificate training in community soil science, and fifty acres of land in the Driftless Region of northwest Illinois, where she stewards a prairie, cultivates medicinal and edible plants, keeps bees and a fruit orchard, raises quail, and grows seed for an indigenous food sovereignty project. 

Austrian collective MVD brings a political perspective to how public space is utilized. Much of their work focuses on housing and is an extension of the legacy of early modernists who have struggled with the question of housing for a century.

The group’s early notoriety stemmed from provocative public installations. In “add on. 20 höhenmeter,” a do-it-yourself installation reached a height of 20 meters in Wallensteinplatz, Vienna. Various containers, including a trailer, were placed within scaffolding and used for living, eating and observing, blurring the lines between what we think of as private and public space. The project was completed with the assistance of students, and while temporary, left an indelible mark on the public consciousness by showing how public space can be co-opted.

MVD’s work is extensive and appears in lectures, workshops, exhibitions and built works. More recently, the group has published The Vienna Model: Housing for the Twenty-First-Century City – a comprehensive examination of 100 years of social housing in Vienna. The project examined dozens of prototypical projects that chart the evolving idea of public space and social housing in Vienna.