Designing a Masterplan for the Robondo Settlement
- Juliet Millican
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
Over the past 18 months Re-Alliance has been working with partners YICE Uganda and Bassattu Innovations in Nakivale, Uganda, and an advisory team drawn from those with significant expertise in masterplanning and refugee settlements, to support a participant-led design process with a group of 20 families in need of homes.
The families were selected from a list of ‘Persons of Concern’ drawn up by the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) who manages the Nakivale refugee camp, and consisted of families with a person with a disability or a single parent vulnerable household in particular need of support.
Our community engagement worker, employed by YICE visited all families on the list to select those who had interest and motivation, to be part of a self designed settlement. The task was not easy. While there was strong interest among families the demands of the project were significant, and involved close involvement with a series of workshops to survey the site and engage with the principles of settlement planning. It was, and remains an ambitious pilot, looking into:
How far local people can and wish to plan their own settlement and their own houses
What a regenerative, closed loop settlement might look like that recycles waste, reuses materials, and conserves water to grow food
Whether we could support from a distance, offering technical advice online and with minimal involvement on the ground
The extent to which local planning authorities would allow innovations and their interest in learning from them to inform other settlement designs.
By the spring of 2025 a final list was drawn up, the site identified, and the members of the advisory team assembled. These included
Arup, the international consultancy firm, who provided pro bono support from their London and Nairobi office in masterplanning, landscape and participatory design
Two representatives from the Ennead lab, an architect's firm in the US who, in 2016 wrote ‘Re-thinking Refugee Communities’ a guide to Masterplanning, used by the UN and updated with support from Re-Alliance in 2025 to include a regenerative lens
A core member of the team who wrote ‘Sphere Unpacked’ Nature Based Solutions for Climate Resilience in Humanitarian Action
A member of ‘The Office for Repair’ a Community of Interest design think tank who work with spatial design on the frontlines of climate concerns.
Throughout the past year, Arup have led from a distance training local facilitators to run co-design workshops with future settlement residents designed around
Building a shared understanding of each other and the contributions of different groups and individuals;
Exploring participants daily lives, needs and their future aspirations;
Translating insights into shared visions for the future settlement and emerging objectives to inform the masterplan
Exploration of regeneration and the importance of inclusion, participation and co-design;
Participatory mapping of existing local ecological, economic and social systems including resources and surrounding land uses;
The environmental conditions of the site, including the soil conditions, wind directions, sun path, water flows and environmental risks and hazards;
Community co-designing activities also included site constraints and opportunities mapping, settlement zoning and layout, housing design, water system management and community building.
Workshops included a visioning exercise to build a shared vision with participants using reference images and case study examples to help imagine a better life, their basic and most pressing needs and their aspirations.The participants undertook a co-mapping exercise to understand their daily patterns and a site assessment to survey the land, map environmental characteristics (movement of sun, prevailing winds, slopes and water systems, planting), human movement and infrastructure like water and energy utilities and identify the risks and hazards to be aware of. Participants also mapped waste and natural resources available onsite or in the surrounding area and those that could be easily purchased, the availability of water and use of surrounding land, all of which led to a zoning layout and the beginning of a masterplan design.
The experience of working largely remotely to support local community groups to manage the design and construction of a settlement themselves has taught us all a lot about different needs and approaches and how to adapt complex language into simple actionable steps. It also showed how participants, who have received minimum schooling, have a strong spatial awareness of their environment and are able to interpret and construct maps of their surroundings. We found that OPM, while needing to uphold standards and protocols, were largely supportive and keen to learn, attending some of the workshops and engaging with the principles we were promoting. Two members of the Arup team, one from London and one from Kenya, made a single final visit to the site, co-leading the final design workshop and checking designs against the reality of the land.
Finally we engaged a water engineer locally to work with a Water Engineer from Fluxus Ecological Designs to look closely at water availability and strategies for water retention. Water is a constant problem in many settlements, both securing a consistent supply during drought, managing drainage from WASH services and dealing with increasing incidents of flooding during rainy seasons. Combining some of the most recent thinking on regenerative water management with strong local knowledge enabled us to design tanks for storage, planting and grading strategies to minimise erosion and stabilise soils, make recommendations for toilets and adequate sanitation and include grey water recycling into the site design.
Arup put together a ‘Design Principles Playbook’ to support the grading process for grading the land and to guide the local team in the early stages of preparing the site for construction. The YICE and Bassatu teams have plans to build with rammed earth interlocking bricks while the Ennead team have been advising on designs that include maximum ventilation and heat cooling mechanisms. OfR are advising on foundations that stabilise buildings, which we intend to last beyond the short termism of refugee camps and offer residents long term homes. Future residents are already growing food, having harvested their first vegetables in May this year, well before they have even built their houses.
Our combined vision for a closed-loop regenerative settlement still only exists on
paper, and the team are struggling with broken grading machines, delayed planning reports and the approaching rains. But construction is scheduled to begin any day now.
Here is a short video by our community correspondent Rolande Asima in Nakivale showing the early project planning phases.
