Turning around a troubled Jamaica neighborhood

The Prince’s Foundation uses traditional urbanism to reclaim difficult settings.��

A Caribbean version of new urbanist techniques is being relied upon to rebuild an impoverished part of West Kingston, Jamaica, that has been ravaged by 30 years of political violence.
    Over the past year, the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, in London, England, has stepped up its efforts to bring social and physical regeneration to Rose Town, a part of the West Kingston ghetto made known worldwide by musician Bob Marley. In March 2008, Prince Charles visited the dangerous area and opened a library — part of a plan that envisions constructing hundreds of houses and other facilities, all in a Jamaican vernacular.
At the time of Charles’s visit, The Guardian newspaper in England described Rose Town as “dominated by ‘garrison politics,’ a system linking criminal gangs with political parties.” Since then, the situation seems to have improved. “Violence is way down,” Hank Dittmar, chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation, recently told New Urban News.
The British newspaper The Financial Times pointed out last October that “members of the rival north and south gangs have already come together through the Rose Town Benevolent Society, the local group overseeing the work.”
The Foundation has been involved in Rose Town since 2004, and in 2006 brought Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) to Jamaica to conduct a five-day workshop that attracted 300 participants. DPZ produced a master plan calling for a range of affordable, traditional-style housing — a far cry from the generally unpopular concrete apartment blocks that had been built in the city in recent decades.
“Buildings will stand close to each other, encouraging interaction between neighbours, and the new streets will be narrow, with little space to park, so residents will walk to their jobs and social activities,” The Financial Times said. A spokesman for Prince Charles observed that rebuilding would embrace “local traditions of cooking and dining out of doors, relying on cooling breezes to ventilate the house, and using courtyards to create secure spaces which interact with the street.”
Ann Hodges, a local architect who is co-managing the project’s design with the Foundation, has been asked to design road barriers that can be opened and closed, depending on how tense conditions are. The atmosphere is evidently not peaceful enough to eliminate barricades, which until now have usually been makeshift collections of tree stumps, rocks, car parts, and other objects.
In recent months, the Foundation has refined the DPZ master plan, developed an implementation strategy, raised money for the first phase, and cleaned up the place with community labor that was organized through the Rose Town Benevolent Society, Dittmar noted.
“We had an architectural charrette just before the end of the year to refine house types and develop codes and details,” Dittmar said. To counteract unemployment and instill skills, local people are being trained in building crafts, which they have already begun using to restore and improve existing houses. “We are at a point where we need to raise the next tranche of funding, and it is time for aid organizations and the government to come in, as all the money has been private this far,” Dittmar said.
The Foundation is active all over the world. Twenty-five projects are under way in the United Kingdom and in other countries, including sites in Sierra Leone, Saudi Arabia, Kabul, Afghanistan, and Beijing, China. Some are carried out by the Foundation itself, which has 15 designers, eight graduate fellows in architecture and planning, and additional staff. Other projects are carried out with partners such as DPZ, John Simpson, Urban Design Associates, Demetri Porphyrios, and Robert Adam Architects.
“The principles are the same, and so are the methods of engagement through design and reflecting local identity in urbanism and architecture,” Dittmar said. “All will be mixed-use and mixed-income, walkable, and composed of perimeter blocks and buildings that activate the streets. All will use a local palette of materials and will reflect local adaptation to climate and culture.”