Don Orione Community Centre offers an invaluable service to mentally and physically disabled children in Ongata Rongai; a dusty dry small town on the outskirts of Nairobi. Outside the energy of a city, the Centre helps children in the surrounding area engage holistically with an intentional model of education, agriculture and medical care. Disabilities are considered a curse within Kenyan culture and as a result many disabled children are badly mistreated. The work at the centre is crucial and valuable.
The site sits on 10 acres and consists of a school, an onsite physiotherapy clinic that provides regular sessions for the children, and a successful vegetable farm that offers the children a means to sustain themselves once they leave school.
The key elements of the brief centered on movement and shade, with a focus on improving disabled access over the whole site, increasing stimulus for the children and an overall improvement of the general environment by planting trees to provide interaction.
Our intervention, although simple, covers the full site. The design intent includes paths and ramps made with local stone which move throughout, providing access to avenues of trees that grace all pathways as a humble intervention to make the journey as peaceful and protected as possible for the disabled children. The color and scent palette for planting was of central importance, as it gave us an opportunity to address sensitive nervous systems through design. The repetitive planting patterns, alongside choiced fragrant flora provides a sense of texture and rhythm to the space, but more importantly a feeling of security and reassurance that is soothing for children.
We chose the indigenous Markamia lutea species, the Nile Tulip, for the avenue trees throughout the whole project, for their rich green foliage and bright, cheerful flowers, again with the children’s wellbeing in mind. Other planting includes a zone of indigenous dryland forest to create a buffer from the road and various food crops such as bananas and passion fruit. The reintroduction of indigenous species has brought back birdlife, filling the air with their song.
The trees were all planted by parents with help from the children, and the construction of paths and ramps were built by a small local construction company using local slate (mazeras) stone. The sense of self-ownership of the children and their families in this project is remarkable and exciting to see. What started as shared participation in the planting process has evolved into a more robust community experience – the campus is now open on weekends for the public, allowing for members of the centre to participate with a larger outside collective. This unites the community, undoing ingrained social barriers that come with perception of the disabled.
Landscape Architecture: The Landscape Studio
Year completed: 2022
Project location: Ongata Rongai, Nairobi, Kenya
Photo credits: The Landscape Studio
