This studio was designed to be an immersive professional experience embracing research and engagement, including access to government officials, local citizens, and a breadth of consultants, as foundations for design.

To conceive of strategies that build on opportunities and address challenges through the development of an urban framework linking to a vision for the Waterfront District of Kingston, including the master planning and design of the major waterfront park.

The Kingston Metropolitan Area is the most important urban concentration in Jamaica, with an estimated population of 700,000, 25% of the national population. Kingston’s waterfront embraces the Kingston Harbor, the 7th largest natural harbor in the world, which played a significant role in the history of Kingston and continues to play an integral part in the country’s economy in global and regional trade as a transshipment port. Notably, Kingston has been the birthplace of almost all forms of Jamaican music and in 2015 earned the title of World Creative Music City by UNESCO.

The government’s vision for the redevelopment of the waterfront and Downtown Kingston, is to create high-quality spaces to attract visitors to the Kingston Waterfront and reinforce the city’s position as a hub for local and regional business. The aim is to promote a mixed-use, 24-7 environment conducive for living, conducting business, working, shopping and entertainment.

The City is beleaguered by profound social, infrastructural, and environmental issues resulting in some of the country’s most profound problems of exclusion and deprivation:

• the city is socially segregated marked by the distinction between uptown and downtown
• 20 percent of Jamaica’s poor, about 69,000 people, reside in the Kingston Metropolitan Area
• the share of the urban area allocated to open public space in Kingston is only 1.8 percent
• only half of the population lives within convenient walking distance to low or high-capacity public transport systems
• urban growth and inadequacies in waste management have led to high levels of pollution in creeks and in the Kingston Harbor

The World Bank homed in on the waterfront district in Kingston as a place to invest dollars to create a vision with the intention of changing the narrative. The World Bank is committed to investing in the design of the waterfront because of the numerous latent opportunities but also largely because of the extreme challenges present in Metropolitan Kingston. The World Bank is one of the world’s largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries. Its five institutions share a commitment to reducing poverty, increasing shared prosperity, and promoting sustainable development