Agroforestry Practices

In the broader imagination of development, we often talk about infrastructure in terms of scale, cost, and visibility: roads, bridges, clinics, schools. But there is another kind of infrastructure, one that is quieter, humbler, and more intimate. This is what I’ve come to call small infrastructure: networks of care, resource-sharing, and cohabitation that blur the lines between human and non-human needs. It’s in the farmland adjacent to a school, where the harvest not only feeds the students but also the goats that graze on the periphery. It’s in the runoff water from handwashing stations that nourishes the soil nearby. It’s in the kitchen gardens behind a clinic that supply both the maternity ward and the neighborhood hens. These are not just technical systems; they are ecological, ethical, and spiritual propositions, gestures of doing well not just for people, but with the world.

This understanding emerged vividly during my documentation of development projects in Kilifi and Mombasa. I witnessed how a single school, modest in size, became a hub for multi-species flourishing. Students were taught how to plant and harvest vegetables; teachers coordinated with nearby farmers to share compost; goats and chickens roamed freely in designated patches of shade. There was no master plan, no glossy blueprint. But there was intention: a quiet choreography of resource flow and mutual benefit that sustained learning, nourishment, and care simultaneously. And in this arrangement, something clicked: doing good in architecture is not about spectacle; it’s about weaving life systems that endure and include.

Small infrastructure operates like a swarm, distributed, responsive, and adaptive. It doesn’t rely on one large intervention but on many small, connected moves. A shaded bench under a mango tree becomes a waiting area, a teaching space, and a feeding spot for birds. A porous fence allows goats to graze without disrupting classes. A classroom wall doubles as a rainwater catchment surface. These moves are not accidents; they’re deeply architectural. They require reading the land, listening to local practices, and designing with an ethic of generosity, not dominance. This approach also resists the idea that architecture must always be permanent or monumental. Sometimes the most powerful forms of care are those that leave room to evolve, decay, and regenerate alongside the environment they inhabit.

This is where the idea of development shifts from “helping” to cohabiting. In Islam, as in many Indigenous belief systems, the earth is not a resource but a companion. Trees, animals, soil, and water all possess forms of life, speech, and praise. A truly ethical aid project, then, must recognize that it operates within a network of rights, not just needs. This is not an abstract philosophy; it has practical implications. When we plan a water well, we should ask not only how many people it serves, but also what plants and animals it can sustain. The projects I found most moving in my research were those where development was not an imposition but a negotiation, where students grew their own food, where animal life was not excluded but invited, where walls breathed, and roofs gathered water. These small systems tell us something urgent about the future of aid architecture: that care cannot be scaled by force, only by attention.

To build for both humans and non-humans is to build for continuity. It is to accept that architecture is not only a tool of enclosure but a medium of kinship. In an era of climate collapse and ecological fragility, these micro-infrastructures, swarm-like, scattered, collaborative, are not marginal. They are the future. And they demand a shift in both mindset and method: from mastery to humility, from control to companionship, from efficiency to flourishing. Only then can development endure