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Blurring Lines : Nima + Maamobi
Modula Grup - Ghana
Ghana, West Africa is no different. Over 76% of the total population in Ghana will be living in the urban cities by 2025. Accra, Ghana’s capital is one of the cities in the world with large proportion of their urban settlements recognized as “slum”. About 80% of the city’s settlements and housing units are considered slum. The majority of these settlements are concentrated in the inner-city. The project takes a critical look at the transforming urban landscape of the African City, usually portrayed by foreign media images as an overwhelming sense of pity and sympathy. These images, however negative do not reflect the vibrance of the people, rich natural resources and local talent of the city. However unpleasant, these tensions could be the activation agents for exploring the emerging urban strategies, thus integrating it with the cultural and spiritual underpinnings of everyday life and to contain urban sprawl. Located at the inner city of the Accra metropolis, Nima-Maamobi are informal settlements that was historically reputed to be a melting pot for Ghanaian laboring classes. Today like many urban communities in African, Nima-Maamobi has witnessed an explosion of uncontrolled spatial transformation that has attracted national and political attention. Ironically most the slums communities in Ghana including other locally famed slum areas James Town and Korle Gonno are scattered along dried or clogged watershed networks (canals). Ghana is drained by a large number of streams and rivers. Unfortunately, several of these streams and clogged rivers dry up during the dry seasons of the year and flooding during the rainy seasons is not uncommon. Like most of the watershed networks that run through the informal settlements in Ghana, they have become dumping sites bordered by informal settlements. In June 2015, hundreds were displaced and properties destroyed in the Accra suburb after the nation experienced one of the worst downpours in history. As city authorities find ways to prevent another flood disaster, it also an opportunity to revisit the new African contemporary city. The project questions the existing abandon infrastructure of the Nima Gutter which runs through the vibrant Nima and Maamobi informal districts, connecting Nima Highway to Kanda Highway dividing the community with a physical boundary as the main drainage of wastewater and storm water out of both Nima and Maamobi. Can this watershed be restored while incorporating existing socio-cultural activities and dynamic spatial transformation as acceptable ingredients for a design intervention? Rather than leaving the fate of the abandon canal to further slum encroachment and erosion the project seeks to create an opportunity for the dry canal corridor to propagate programmatic elements capable of embodying simultaneous spatial and sociocultural organization through everyday life activities. The Nima corridor connects to a final node, a community center, located at the formal sector, crossing an activated pedestrian bridge over the highway as a flow of spirituality extension, bringing together both formal and informal activities to infiltrate and activate the ground plane
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