PROJECT 01
KENYATTA farms
Land, Ecology, and Institution-Building
Unity Hall, Jamaica
What can Caribbean land repair?
Kenyatta Farms begins from the proposition that land is more than a site for development. Land holds histories of cultivation, dispossession, labor, ecological change, livelihood, and social relation. The project asks what forms of repair might become possible when those relations are reorganized through research, cultivation, design, and institution-building.
Kenyatta Farms is CaribLab’s inaugural site-based research and design project in Jamaica. The project asks how land can sustain ecological systems, cultivation, research, teaching, cultural production, gathering, livelihood, and institutional development without assuming that development must begin with large-scale construction or continuous external capital.The farm is approached as an existing field of relations rather than an empty site awaiting design. Water, vegetation, soil, labor, infrastructure, agricultural knowledge, history, access, neighboring communities, and existing forms of use establish the conditions from which future interventions must proceed.CaribLab has partnered with Kenyatta Farms to develop and test a method of research-led planning in which documentation precedes design, design proceeds through alternatives rather than a predetermined master plan, and built interventions are evaluated by the capacities they produce and sustain.
The Land is Relation
THE GROUND
The first phase of work documents Kenyatta Farms as it currently exists. Research will establish how ecological, infrastructural, historical, and social systems intersect across the property, creating the empirical ground from which planning and design can proceed.
LAND
Topography, boundaries, access, existing uses.
ECOLOGY
Vegetation, soils, microclimates, existing habitats.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Structures, utilities, paths, storage, energy.
RELATIONS
Neighbors, institutions, communities, local expertise.
MATERIAL × REPAIR
Kenyatta Farms provides a place to investigate repair materially. The question is not simply how damaged land or infrastructure might be improved, but how existing resources can be reorganized to support different relations among ecology, production, knowledge, culture, and collective life.Planning therefore becomes an inquiry into capacity. Which interventions reduce dependence? Which forms of infrastructure enable several activities at once? Which ecological systems can perform productive work? Which spaces allow teaching, gathering, cultivation, cultural practice, and livelihood to coexist? Which institutional arrangements can maintain what is built?
DESIGNING KENYATTA
Design will proceed through improvisational development scenarios rather than a single master plan. Each scenario will be assessed through ecological performance, capital requirements, labor, maintenance, accessibility, productive capacity, public use, and institutional sustainability.
WATER
Drainage, rainfall, storage, movement, scarcity.
PRODUCTION
Cultivation, food systems, agricultural knowledge, labor.
HISTORY
Land-use history, memory, previous interventions.
ECONOMY
Costs, maintenance, productive activities, institutional sustainability.
01 / MINIMUM INFRASTRUCTURE
A low-capital approach emphasizing water, cultivation, landscape systems, outdoor gathering, adaptive reuse, and incremental intervention.
02 / PRODUCTIVE INSTITUTION
A more developed arrangement combining agriculture, research, teaching, cultural activity, gathering, workspace, and revenue-producing functions.
03 / CARIBBEAN LABORATORY
A longer-term scenario exploring what Kenyatta Farms could become as a larger research, design, cultural, and educational institution.