Aid Architecture in Kenya has been shaped by fieldwork in Mombasa, Kilifi, and their surrounding regions, which function as living archives of how philanthropy becomes materialized and how communities engage with it in their everyday environments. These sites demonstrate that aid is not neutral infrastructure but a spatial practice that mediates power, belonging, and identity.

Mombasa, as Kenya’s historic port city, provided a critical entry point. Its long history of Indian Ocean trade and cultural exchange has made it a locus for religious, educational, and philanthropic projects. Schools, clinics, and mosques supported by international donors were not merely functional but symbolic markers of transnational connection. They revealed how benefactors inscribe their aspirations onto the urban fabric while communities reframe these buildings through use, memory, and local adaptation. Mombasa thus became a site where the intersection of global philanthropy and coastal heritage could be studied in visible form.

Kilifi, by contrast, highlighted the intimate and embodied scale of aid. Here, wells, schools, and health facilities were not only services but social anchors that organized gathering, care, and learning. Observing these sites made evident how architecture, when situated within everyday rhythms, actively shapes forms of solidarity and dependency.

Together, these field sites underscore that aid architecture cannot be understood as isolated structures. A clinic, a school, or a well reverberates across social, cultural, and temporal dimensions. They reveal how philanthropy becomes tangible in Kenya, producing architectures that are simultaneously local and transnational, material and relational, immediate in function yet embedded in larger humanitarian geographies.