Claim your City

Story by Stine Kronsted, Urban Design Lead, Dreamtown

What would the city look like if the youth could take the lead? This is a question we keep seeking answers for through our work. In January 2022, we asked the question through a workshop for our project, ‘Claim Your City’, developed in partnership with Youth Dream Center Sierra Leone. We gave the word to 20 young people from Bonga Town and asked which positive change they wanted to happen in their community. And then we asked them to do it.

So what is Bonga Town? It is a small community situated down steep dirt roads, behind the busy life of Wilkinson Road in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It is built next to the riverside and only few people know of its existence. Here, people live side by side in an organic, self-grown shed structure that is connected by winding passages, crossing the many waterways with home-built wooden bridges. Moving through the community is a sensuous experience. There is vital buzz of the quotidian life; street vendors, water-fetchers, builders and running children keep the streets moving, while people cooking, hairdressing and chatting sit around on every doorstep and street corner.

But what you cannot see with your eyes is the strong network of youth groups, that have organized themselves within the community. Groups with names like Iron Ladies, United Youth, Faithful Family and Concern Family form extended families for many young people in the community.

Common for all the groups is that they work for a better, stronger, and more resilient Bonga Town. And they want young people to have a voice.

Leaders and members of these groups were the participants of the Claim Your City Workshop. The first part of the workshop was about building a common understanding of the community as a whole. The youth made hand-drawn maps, revealing important aspects of Bonga Town; landmarks, infrastructure, nodes, services, etc. They discussed the challenges that the community faces, the potentials, and visited places they had never seen before.

The second part zoomed in on the challenges they found most pressing. They came up with creative ideas that could solve daily-life issues – everything from improved waterways and waste management to safer bridges and child-care. They worked on low-cost, low-tech solutions that they had the opportunity to build from their position as youth groups. In the end, all the groups had made one idea, and they had to vote for the best idea – this one had to be built in real-life.

A topic that came up repeatedly during the five-days workshop was the issue with clean drinking water. The youth reported of community taps not working, the wrong people taking money for using the ones functioning, and unsafe conditions for fetching water after dark due to crime. The winning idea was repairing a water tap situated by the community center and setting up a youth committee to handle the use of it. A small fee will be charged for fetching water, and these money will be used to maintain the tap and to fund some of the other ideas from the workshop. In addition to this, the youth wanted to facilitate community cleanings every fortnight, using the funds from the project to buy cleaning materials.

So what would the city look like if the youth could take the lead? Well, we got a lot of very inspiring and innovative ideas for a positive urban change in the community of Bonga Town. It may be small scale but once finished, it will have a large impact in a lot of ‘Bonga Towners’ lives – young people and everyone else living in the community.

We will keep asking this question for working toward more youth-friendly cities.

Thanks to Youth Dream Center Sierra Leone for collaboration and co-facilitation.

Thanks to the super cool and inspiring youth groups who invested their time in the project.

Thanks to CISU for the donation that made this project possible.