Over the last two decades, the Freetown Peninsula has seen the greatest amount of rapid expansion in the country due to rural economic hardships and subsequent migration to urban centres. This has led to an already strained infrastructure being pushed to breaking point. Planned areas of the city have been densified with a flurry of new mid-rise residential blocks maximising land use. The survey was concentrated on the downtown Christchurch area, a prominent and fairly affluent Krio neighbourhood in central Freetown littered with Board Houses, which ARCSR students surveyed back in 2014. The choice to survey Christchurch was made as a method of extending the existing research, while also gathering an understanding of the pivotal feature of Samba Gutter, a 2km long bricked open drain, which bisects the neighbourhood from North to South

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In order to provide a vehicle - conceived as an ‘urban imaginary’ - for the collective ‘voice’ (Arjun Appadurai) of informal settlements in Freetown; ARCSR provisionally adopted the concept of physical ‘Lines through the City’ (Tim Ingold) based on perceived hypothetical shared affordances along these physical lines. These proposed lines were set out on settlements previously studied by ARCSR & ASF-UK on first-hand physical and cultural data recorded in reports and publications.

 

In this research, Interpretive mapping has been used as an exploratory tool to map and discuss the unique socio-topographical issues facing 7 rapidly-developing unplanned settlements in region. The primary basis for this exploration is utilising the theme of four topographical lines: Contour, Forest, River & Coast at urban through to household scales. The insights developed through this process allow ARCSR to map and predict both physical and social issues simultaneously at both civic and domestic scales, enabling exchange and interaction at different points. It is hoped that current practices of remote working could facilitate more profound collaborative practice with local partnering organisations, sharing/exchanging different approaches to community resilience.