MGM is deconstructing the “public park.” Their trees are planted in forgotten schoolyards, random unused strips of land, or any other space that isn’t being used. Everyone is a volunteer; there are no sponsors nor politicians involved.
Wyban Mwangi, a Mathare-based writer, is a member of MGM. Taking a break from digging, he explains, “If you change the environment around people, you can change how people think of it, and you can change how they see themselves.” In his creative work, Mwangi pushes what he calls “Mathare Futurism,” imagining the future of Mathare through the eyes of people who live there, not from outsiders’. Planting trees, he says, it is not just about “beautifying” the space. It is about creating habits of cooperation.
But how can planting trees possibly accomplish that? The sequence of work is simple, Mwangi explains, but importantly, it requires long-term and collective action. First, a group of people must come together to imagine something as a collective, in this case, a park. They must work towards it over a long period of time, like seeking permission to plant on an unused plot of land, a process that can take months. They build it together, doing the physical work of digging up the soil, and then they cultivate it, maintaining the trees forever. The goal of MGM is that, over time, tree-planting becomes a community “habit,” something people become accustomed to and come to expect—the result being not the trees themselves, but the act of working together to realize an imagined future.
“We don’t do ‘events,’” says Oyunga Pala, one of the founding members of MGM. “Too often in Kenya we focus on the optics of tree-planting and neglect the long-term process of cultivating, protecting, and sharing the tree.” The length of this process, the rootedness that “raising” a tree requires, he says, is antithetical to the forces that shape the lives of many youths in Mathare: precariousness, disposability, suspicion. The simple work that MGM is doing—reclaiming the art of collective cultivation—is thus more radical than it would first appear.
Recently, MGM took its members on a group trip to the lush Karura Forest, one of Nairobi’s largest parks, just on the other side of a superhighway from Mathare. For most of the members, it was the first time they had ever been there. The park was fenced, secured with armed guards, and required an admission fee far beyond the means of most people who live in Mathare. Pala explains that, for many of Nairobi’s poor, when they see a tree, it means they are in an affluent area. It means they are in a place they can only access when passing through or working there. The tree, in a disturbing and twisted way, is a class barrier.
At the same time, Mathare, like many other urban informal settlements around the world, has become the city’s dumping ground, meaning that what residents see, and where they live, is trash. Needless to say, this makes for a dangerous, unsanitary, and undignified place to live. When we think of sustainability, this is perhaps what we immediately think of: waste, that we should produce less of it, and that we shouldn’t dump it where people live.
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