Kounkuey Design Initiative

At Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), we believe design is equipped to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Yet, we also recognize that too many people—far too many people—have been excluded from design processes and oppressed by designed environments, creating an unequal playing field. This inequality has grave implications, with measurable impact on both life expectancy and quality of life. By designing more equitable environments, KDI aims to address these broader concerns, believing the place of one’s birth should not dictate the length of one’s life. 

Like you, we recognize the urgency and complexity of the challenges that face us: COVID-19 has wreaked disproportionate havoc on people of color, exacerbating long-standing inequities and creating new ones; climate risks abound, reshaping communities and rendering others uninhabitable; and gentrification is intensifying, deepening a sense of precarity in neighborhoods already beset by generations of racism and disinvestment. 

The Elevate Prize’s network of partners and awardees, along with the financial support, would be critical in helping KDI meet these challenges head-on. Because the challenges we address are complex and intersectional, we know that solutions are best developed in dialogue with a network of experts, such as the one supported by The Elevate Prize. 

A designer and urban planner by training, I co-founded Kounkuey Design Initiative with five other Harvard Graduate School of Design classmates in 2006. We set out to direct design and planning toward some of the most pressing challenges that stem from generations of racist urban and regional development practices. Since then, our team has grown to over 40 professionals spread across three continents. I continue to serve as executive director. 

I’m committed to expanding participation in design and urban planning. These professions, and the spaces they create, have long excluded women, BIPOC communities, and LGBTQ people—a legacy with dire consequences. Within the Los Angeles metropolitan region, for example, residents have the same prevailing climate, economy, and governance. Yet, neighborhood by neighborhood, life expectancy differs in substantive ways. In Malibu, for example, average life expectancy is 90 years. In Watts, where vital social infrastructure is lacking, it's about 75 years. 

These disparities are no mere accident. They exist by design. I am committed to ensuring that design does its job differently and better—that it rights the wrongs it already created, and that the design professions take an active role in making neighborhoods and cities fairer and more just. 

In the U.S. and around the world, the locality of a person’s birth determines lifespan and quality of life. KDI works to correct these injustices, elevating communities left behind from design and ensuring they have the social infrastructure necessary to lead long, healthy lives.

In California, for instance, we developed a new framework that enables community groups to transform vacant, city-owned lots into vibrant, neighborhood-based parks; in just two years, this program has brought local spaces to 30,000 residents. We also designed and built Nuestro Lugar, a 5-acre park that addresses climate-related risks and boosts income-earning opportunities for a community in the 99th percentile of poverty. 

In Kibera, an impoverished, informal settlement in Kenya, KDI created a novel way of delivering new public space to high-need communities. Engaging over 5,000 residents in the design process, we’ve developed a network of 11 public spaces in this dense urban environment. The network has provided 520 meters of flood protection, boosted income-earning opportunities, strengthened public health infrastructure, and expanded access to education. 

These changes create meaningful improvements in the lives of community members long marginalized by the built environment, improving quality of life and extending length of life. 

Our entire business model is innovative. Whereas some design firms undertake mission-driven work as a pro bono initiative underwritten by other streams of for-profit work, KDI created an organizational model whereby all of our work is mission driven and done alongside communities that lack the resources to fund design and construction. This model has allowed us to address challenges proactively, without having to wait for a client to issue a request for services. 

Divorced from conventional “design-as-service-industry” thinking, we have advanced a far more substantial, radical vision of service: one that puts the power of design in the hands of community members; that invites them to lead our iterative, in-depth process; that develops public spaces and addresses their environmental, social, and economic priorities. Along the way, we’ve shown government partners, design students, and other professionals that it is both an ethical imperative and a better strategy to work with residents, not for them.

KDI has also been recognized for its innovations in participatory design and its inclusivity through all phases of design and construction projects. We work in multiple languages, across media, at different times of day, and through different activity types to involve the broadest set of voices possible. 

KDI has had direct and measurable impact on humanity by planning, designing, and building changes to historically disinvested neighborhoods in ways that make them more equitable with neighborhoods that have long been the focus of resources and design. By expanding access to public spaces, we've bolstered income-earning opportunities, environmental resilience, and community-organizing infrastructure, improving the quality of life for the many tens of thousands of people who live in those neighborhoods. 

In Kenya, we have designed a growing network of 11 new public spaces that have augmented public health, improved environmental resilience, and boosted the quality of life for Kibera residents in qualitative and quantitative ways. In Los Angeles, we have designed and built a series of new public spaces in neighborhoods that long lacked them, setting out to undo the zip code-based inequities of LA. And in the Eastern Coachella Valley, we have built new public spaces and transportation systems to make this poverty-stricken region better positioned to address challenges. 

Our work is scalable. In 2019, for example, the World Bank commissioned KDI to author the Handbook for Gender-Inclusive Urban Planning and Design, which provides actionable strategies for communities around the world to make urban spaces more equitable.