The History of the Nakivale Regenerative Settlement Project

The Regenerative Refugee Settlement project in Nakivale is led by YICE, our partner in Uganda, under the guidance of their director Noah Ssempijja, alongside a team from Arup as advisors. The project is based on 3 acres of land within the Rubondo zone of Nakivale Refugee Settlement where 20 refugee households will take part in a participatory design for a regenerative settlement on the site together with YICE. After designing the site, householders will help to build their homes and gardens and live together in their ‘village’.

When I first spoke to Noah about the possibilities for developing this, more than a year ago now, he went away to consider what a regenerative settlement might look like. He came back with details of Blueprint200, a project with a similar aim to be built in Portugal in 2018.

For us at Re-Alliance it was an amazing synchronicity to see this. We didn’t know this material was even accessible on the internet but the project, and the work behind it, was intricately connected with the founding of Re-Alliance in 2019.

Blueprint, a loose collaboration of friends who were all involved in different ways in regenerative technologies, was established after the death of one of their group, Paulo Mellett, in 2014. Paulo, a strong advocate for permaculture, ecology and equality died after an illness contracted in Ghana, and his friends came together to continue his work. Blueprint was an opportunity to trial some of these technologies in action, and after acquiring land on the site of Tamera, a community in Portugal, they planned to build a model site educating on alternative solutions for displaced people. They wrote at the time:

‘We are at the confluence of resource depletion, climate instability and economic inequality where we all need solutions for regenerative living. The global refugee situation offers a chance to direct the potential of these solutions towards this pressure point of our time; serving some of the people most in need today. Our project will build an inspiring demonstration and training center in Tamera in the form of a temporary settlement for 200 people. This will serve as an evolving model for regenerative design which fosters trust and restores the surrounding landscape. The design integrates the elements of water, energy, shelter, food and social cohesion which can be used in emergency responses. Those who stay in, visit and study the model will gain a new perspective, in a way that continuously influences camp designs, standards, and policies for displaced people and refugees’.

Between 2016 and 2018 they developed a series of Pattern Cards, based on a Regenerative Continuum and a set of ‘Contradictions’. This provided a toolkit for decision making on how to integrate water, shelter, energy, food and social cohesion into a humanitarian aid context to ensure protection & safeguarding as well as a harmonious sense of wellbeing. 

The cards were developed, the site acquired, research was undertaken in Algeria and initial earthworks were started on site. Sadly, planning regulations in Portugal prevented the project from finally coming to fruition. 

Re-Alliance was formed in 2019 to further continue that work. As a registered charity with dedicated resources it was led partly by members of Paulo’s family and included some of the original Blueprint network. It shares similar aims, of developing, piloting in situ and sharing knowledge to support communities in building their own solutions. Over the past six years we have partnered with members to implement 16 individual pilots, shared learnings from these via multiple booklets, videos, podcasts and webinars, and looked more closely at the different guidelines that exist around settlement design and regenerative or nature-based solutions. Deciding to bring these together in an integrated, closed-loop system for 20 families, around 150 people, is the culmination of this work. We’re also happy to be working with Arup who bring an expertise in design, consulting, and planning of projects of significant scale.

Collaborative mapping with the participants in Rubondo

My first conversation about this with Noah and his own discovery of the Blueprint materials brings us full circle, as we move forward with these guidelines and all those acquired since to design this with the people who will live there. While the setbacks of the Blueprint 200 project seemed frustrating at the time, the project in Nakivale goes further to empower the people most effected by displacement in their own recovery and is a more appropriate context for this community-driven design project. The first workshops have shown already the incredible possibilities when people are empowered to design for themselves.