Introducing Relational Design as a Discipline for Stewarding Life in Place.
Nalubaaga Bioregion, Kampala, Uganda
Kiwaatule-2030 is a learning by doing Urban Regeneration initiative. In our previous post we explored how the role of technology could shift towards enriching relations in a place — bioregion. In this post, we situate relational intelligence in the story of Kampala and Kiwaatule. How this initiative intends to birth relational design as a way of healing broken relations in a place. We then explore the instruments needed to manifest this relational intelligence.
ORGANIZING QUESTION: What is the highest order of value this initiative could create — not for the project, but for the living place it is nested within and, through that place, for the world?
A collective practice of Relational Design as a discipline for how human communities steward the web of relations within the living systems of their place. Not design that delivers products or projects to a place, but design that gathers neighbourhoods around three questions: What could a richer relation between x and y in our place look like? Who are the parties to this relation, and how do we include them in ko-designing its healing? How do we measure the health of this relation and those cascading from its healing?
What Kiwaatule-2030 creates in the world is the demonstrated capacity for urban neighbourhoods to transition toward co-stewarding life — enriching relations in integrity with the intelligence of the living systems they inhabit — by enabling them to:
Self-organise around natural boundaries — re-embedding humans into natural ecosystems
Fund the healing and restoring of broken relations within the web of life in their place
Self-manage shared resources through life-affirming processes, structures, and systems
Self-regenerate through rebuilding trust for lasting collaboration and biocultural renewal
THE GROUND
What place-sourced potential calls this into being?
Indigenous and regenerative thinking share a foundational insight that has deep consequences for how we currently inhabit urban areas and how we could evolve that: places are larger living beings with inherent essence and potential. After a year of listening to her living patterns, we’ve identified Kampala’s candidate essence as — a place where diverse energies converge to recondition landscapes — a pattern that has repeated at every scale of its evolution across geophysical, ecological, cultural, and economic landscapes. The core value that comes from diverse energies converging and reconditioning different landscapes is that the playing field is always levelled for diverse beings to contribute with vitality and viability, and to evolve themselves and the place to higher orders of potential.
This pattern is traceable across time. Uganda had attained erosional equilibrium and stood on a levelled land surface with most of Africa. During the Cretaceous period, easterly and westerly tectonic forces converged in the Great Lakes region, reshaping that levelled surface into rolling hills and valleys. The resulting catchment basins fed aquifers, which fed springs, which fed more than thirty wetlands inter-networked with lakes and rivers — provisioning the fertile soils, rich food systems, and biodiversity within which life diversified into new forms. Those same ecological conditions shaped the earliest known chapter of human evolution: Homo Habilis — the first known tool-using human ancestor, whose fossils are found around Lake Nalubaale (mother of guardian gods) — emerged here because this place’s new ecological complexity created the dietary changes and survival pressures that expanded the human brain. From that first expansion of intelligence came the capacity for kinship: naming, storying, relating, and belonging to place. The city’s own name records this — Kasozi ka Impala, hill of impalas — humans lived in enough right relationship with their place to name it after their nonhuman neighbours.
That kinship deepened into governance. Diverse warring chiefdoms converged under one Kingdom – Buganda, reconditioning the social landscape. The Bantu who inhabited this region ko-created complex cultural commons — spiritual and governance tools that held the web of life together.
They self-organised around Emitala — bioregional boundaries drawn by rivers, wetlands, forests, and hills, not by surveyed plots or monetary value — as the primary frame for organising social consciousness, thinking, and behaviour.
Within these bioregions, Emiziro — totemic systems across 52+ plant, bird, insect, and animal species — wove humans into kinship with all life, each totem a material representation of a Bantu ethnic history, essence, and future potential, evoking the timeless qualities and responsibilities that unified a community with the living world.
This kinship awakened and enlivened Obutaka — the land-sourced ancestry to belonging, authority, and calling to care for all life in a place: not “I own this land” but “I belong to this land, and bearing that belonging, I am called to care for all life here.”
Obutaka, was past and future baked into present intentions and decisions naturally expressing itself through Obuwanika — the ongoing collective practice of stewarding the land not as a resource to extract and accumulate, but as a source of life to care for.
All of this nested into Obuntu — the recognition that being human is being in healthy relation with the other, human and nonhuman alike: the nested interdependence of all life as a living self-governance principle.
Together, these cultural commons maintained healthy relations between human and nonhuman kin, across generations, by grounding collective decisions in the intelligence of the living place rather than in the interests of any individual or institution.
Colonial tenure reconditioned this governance landscape again — this time fragmenting land into individual plots, separating people from the kinship systems that had held the web of life together, replacing Obutaka with extractive land use oriented toward speculative accumulation.
Kiwaatule, a suburb of Kampala, carries Kampala’s DNA into her own essence — and expresses it most distinctively as the Obuntu Living Drum. Her low hills and wide valley formed a natural basin: underground aquifers feeding Nalubaaga wetland, whose plant-rooted marshes slowed and spread water, filtering it into nutrient-rich flows that provisioned agriculture, biodiversity, and human settlements across five districts and 80 miles of watershed through to the Nile. Nalubaaga once hosted primates, birds, leopards, and diverse flora — a self-sustaining system of mutualism in which each being played a role in sustaining the whole. During community dialogues, one elder recalled seeing a leopard in his youth — perhaps the one local tradition calls Luwaatudde — that warned residents of danger while being respected in turn. A great black snake resting peacefully on the rocks where springs emerged encoded a deeper truth in local mythology: harmony comes from respecting the boundaries of living systems. When the King viewed this flourishing evergreen valley from Banda Hill, he named it Omutala Oguwaatudde — a plentiful bioregion.
Kampala’s pattern — diverse energies converging to recondition landscapes, levelling the playing field for more life to flourish — expressed itself in Kiwaatule as plentifulness becoming collective joy. The valley’s fertility nurtured an abundance mindset: locals welcomed newcomers, sheltered and fed them, and self-organised to build roads, pipe water, and create markets while other communities waited for government programs. In Buganda culture, the drum carries two inseparable functions: it calls people to a higher collective purpose — summoning community toward something that matters for the common good of their place — and it evokes the ceremony and joy that makes collective action worth living. Kiwaatule became both. The meaning of her name evolved from Omutala Oguwaatudde — plentiful bioregion — to Okuwaatula Engoma: drummings of joy. A place where the web of life, human and nonhuman, beats together in a shared rhythm.
Colonial tenure fragmented that rhythm. With today’s urban pressures, land is hyperfragmented into 5–14 owners per acre, making Nalubaaga’s hydrological intelligence structurally impossible to express. Springs are blocked beneath concrete, forests cleared, community trust dissolved, and collective action retreated into fenced compounds and high crime. Even as it was dying, the capacity for collective action resurfaced in community policing against violent crime — sometimes manifesting as mob justice. Some people have said, even the economic situation is a source of loss and struggle.
The meaning of Kiwaatule recorded the consequence: Okuwaatula Abantu — unfortunate deaths or loss and struggle. Obutaka — caring for the land as a source of life — devolved into extractive land use, where land became a speculative resource. Fragmented land use fragmented hydrology, which fragmented biodiversity, community and household dreams, fragmented governance, and financial flows. This is one broken web of relations, not separate problems.
Some elders have said: maybe even Kiwaatule (the soul) is dead. Yet one mythology speaks of firewood from Nalubaaga’s forests that stops burning during the day but glows like a star at night — awakening us to a different truth: even when forests and wetlands appear depleted, their energy persists, waiting to be renewed by the light of new knowledge. Nalubaaga still floods when it rains — her hydrological capacity is blocked, not destroyed. As one elder said: if you don’t build people’s capacity to care for natural ecosystems, they will eventually be the ones who degrade them. Renewal starts not with the wetland, but with the human heart.
The seed of collective renewal is already present. Existing self-organising initiatives like the Kiwaatule Bakozi Housing Cooperative and Kiwaatule Joint Families show that the capacity for collective action is dormant, not dead. In neighbourhood kinship dialogues, people said tweezule — let’s do collective self-discovery. And when we guided 40+ landowners to visualise a different relation with the land, something shifted. Asked what is preventing Kiwaatule from reaching her potential, they told us themselves: it’s the way we use land, the way we govern land — in fragments. Guided to see a different relation, 92% said yes to collective land stewarding when conditions for trust transparency are created.
But what does it mean to collectively steward a place today? How do we grow from landowning to landstewarding? What is the role of money in this transition? Who do funders need to become, and how do funding processes, structures, and systems evolve to serve this life-affirming work? These questions can only be answered by an active place-based community practicing listening to the intelligence of their living systems — thinking differently, designing differently, governing differently, funding differently.
The place-sourced potential for doing so is already four-fold: an awakened community ready to practise this transition; a living list of broken relations generated through 24 months of neighbourhood dialogues waiting to be healed; the Obutaka Gathering Cycle — reconstituted from the cultural commons and tested over those same 24 months — as the governance process; and the need for a fourth ingredient: a funding mechanism that flows with the energy and living intelligence of the gathering cycle rather than against it.
This is the evolutionary potential Kiwaatule is ready to express at a higher order: to become the Obuntu Living Drum of urban renewal in Kampala and beyond — the place where landstewards, funders, elders, and Nalubaaga herself converge around the practice of Relational Design, asking what a richer relation between each part of this living place could look like, building the governance and finance that allow those relations to heal, and drumming a rhythm of transition to right relation with the web of life that every fragmented city needs to hear.
The core narrative echoed by the Obuntu Living Drum is that the polycrisis or specifically the climate crisis is not about carbon, rather it is a symptom of broken relations: Between humans and nature; Between communities and their ecosystems; Between our economic system and the living world. The regenerative imperative is not to capture more carbon, rather to restore/heal these broken relations—one at a time. And as a measure of the aliveness or health of how one relates to other life in a place, Obuntu offers a pathway to systemic regeneration.
THE GOAL
What new capability will this initiative grow in the place?
The end-state this initiative is working toward is not a restored wetland, though that is part of it. It is not a distributed stewarding cooperative of landowners, though that too is part of it. The end-state is a Nalubaaga Bioregion that has developed the capacity to continuously and collectively design its own renewal — a living system that has grown the regenerative capability of listening to its own living intelligence, acting from it, and deepening that capacity over time.
In terms of vitality: Nalubaaga wetland is hydrologically functional again — springs unblocked, wetland alive, reforested and rewilded, biodiversity returning, microclimate cooling restored, food systems growing from the land’s own productivity. And alongside these ecological pulses, a community whose cultural vitality has been reawakened: people who understand themselves as Obutaka holders, as belonging-to-place, as co-responsible for all life within it.
In terms of viability: 530+ acres governed as a co-stewarded bioregional commons, with the wetland herself as a living shareholder and Future Generations as structural participants in every governance gathering. Rather importing solutions, a product innovation centre to develop the creative potential of locals to design, build and manage them from local materials, innovating informal supply-chains to create new jobs from regenerative ventures on a commons model. These can be catalysed through a funding architecture anchored in community-issued Obuntu Resets — Units of Caring — that flows money toward enriching specific broken relations the community of life has identified and decided to heal. A new type of institution whose sole organising principle is the health of the bioregion — not political priority, not financial return, not organisational survival.
In terms of evolutionary capability: the specific new ableness this initiative must grow is a design discipline. Kiwaatule-2030’s role is not to deliver a project and leave. It is to prototype and give form to Relational Design — a way of designing human systems that starts from the relations within a place that are broken, includes all the parties to those relations in the design process, and measures success by the quality of relations healed. This discipline does not yet fully exist. Kiwaatule is its first full expression in the world.
The concept at the heart of this initiative: Kiwaatule-2030 creates and lives the practice of Relational Design — designing the healing of broken relations in a living place through processes that include all the parties to those relations, financed by money that flows as kin rather than extractor.
THE DIRECTION
What is this place called to become? What vocation gives the initiative its ordering intelligence?
Kiwaatule has always carried Kampala’s essence — the convergence of diverse energies that reconditions landscapes and levels the playing field for more life to flourish. But like a daughter carries her parents’ traits, she carries it in her own particular way: as a drum. At her deepest, Kiwaatule is the Obuntu Living Drum — the place within Kampala where diverse energies have always been gathered, called to a common rhythm, and transformed into collective joy and provisioning for the whole. Tectonic forces converged and created the conditions for biological flourishing. Diverse clans converged and created the conditions for cultural kinship. Even colonial disruption, for all its damage, by distributing land rights more widely than any single chief had held, levelled a political playing field that carries latent potential for a new form of distributed land governance. The pattern persists through its distortions. The drum has not been destroyed — it has been muffled beneath layers of colonial fragmentation: fragmented land tenure, fragmented governance, fragmented money flows, fragmented relations between humans and the living world they depend on.
What Kiwaatule-2030 is working toward is the deveiling of that drum — the systematic removal of the colonial overlays that prevent this place from expressing its own deepest intelligence. Not a return to the past, but a conscious, higher-order iteration of the pattern that has always defined this place. The word Kiwaatule carries, in its root syllables, plentifulness, joy, and loss and struggle. A fourth meaning is possible — one not yet named, because it has not yet been earned: a place that has learned to continuously regenerate its own relations with land, water, nonhuman kin, and future generations, and that offers this capacity as a learning gift to every city that has fragmented its natural systems and needs to find its way back.
This vocation functions as both polestar and touchstone. As polestar: every design choice, governance structure, and financial mechanism can be tested against the question — does this help Kiwaatule express her deepest intelligence, or does it add another layer of fragmentation? As touchstone: people who know and love this place, who carry ancestors here and raise children here — when they hear this direction articulated, something in them recognises it not as aspiration but as memory.
THE INSTRUMENT
Who and what must come together to make this real?
There is already a relationship between communities and funders. In its current form it runs through the NGO structures: a proposal is written purposely to align with funder metrics, a grant is awarded, a solution is delivered, outputs are reported, and the cycle repeats. The systems within this NGO container — log-frames, theory-of-change documents — orient toward what the organisation will do in the place. When the grant ends, the organisation moves on. The place remains. In this architecture, money is designed to flow toward proposals from distant experts. Expert intelligence — detached from place — is the deep attractor for funding.
Building on that interest of impacting life on earth, Kiwaatule-2030’s invitation is to elevate this mechanism to a higher order of function — one that centres the living intelligence of the place itself. This does not mean specialist knowledge is discarded; rather it’s sourced from the geophysical, hydrological, biological, socio-cultural, settlement, mythological, and spiritual patterns that have influenced a unique place over time, rather than from cookie-cutter global best practices. So, what if Place Intelligence is the deep attractor for funding? In Kiwaatule, three new elements make this possible:
Self-organising: Landowners, the wetland, and future generations are self-organising under a Distributed Stewarding Cooperative called Nalubaaga Valley Community Cooperative — an institution accountable to the vitality, viability, and evolutionary capacity of Nalubaaga Bioregion, not to organisational performance or distant impact metrics. It’s Not an institution working in Kiwaatule — an institution of Kiwaatule, constituted by the place’s own governance logic.
Self-managing and self-regenerating: We’ve reconstituted our cultural commons into The Obutaka Gathering Cycle — a four-stage gathering process including; Knowledge gathering, Kin gathering, Decision gathering, and Action gathering, in which as was ancient culture, the wetland participates as a source of living knowledge and as a decision-maker and Future Generations hold a structured voice in every gathering. One decimal of land equals one relational vote, tied to a specific relation it seeks to heal. Governance becomes a monthly practice — reclaiming agency for collective stewarding of place, not a five-year act of voting for representatives in distant parliament.
Funding: resetting the flow of money to enriching relations in place through Obuntu Resets — community-issued Units of Caring that flow money toward specific broken relations the community has identified and decided to heal, for instance: Residents ⇋ Wetland, Residents ⇋ Soil and Food, Residents ⇋ Waste, Residents ⇋ Hope and Neighbourhood Pride, Youth ⇋ Attention and Purpose, Residents ⇋ Collective Agency, Landowners ⇋ Stewardship, etc. The funder resources the community’s decision — not the other way around. This changes what money measures (quality of relations healed rather than outputs delivered), what it flows toward (community decisions rather than expert proposals), and who it is accountable to (the living place and its stewards).
Funding Learning Journeys structure funders’ own development: from external problem-solvers deploying capital toward communities, into co-stewards resourcing decisions that communities of life have already made together — thereby evolving what finance itself can become.
Both sides of this guild must develop simultaneously.
On April 4, landowners gather through the Obutaka Gathering Cycle — for the first time deliberating collectively with Nalubaaga and Future Generations as structural participants — and prioritise the first relations they will heal together in 2026.
On April 7, funders gather not to evaluate a proposal but to enter a relationship with a living place, encounter what the landsteward community has already built over 24 months, and develop the capability to resource what that community has decided. These are not two separate events. They are the same reconditioning happening simultaneously from both sides of the existing funder-community relationship — the Obuntu Living Drum beginning to beat from both ends at once. When the landstewards’ governance decisions connect to funding that flows at the speed of caring rather than the speed of proposal cycles, the co-evolutionary relationship between place and money is seeded. When that relationship matures and produces measurable healing in the relations within Nalubaaga Bioregion, the discipline it embodies becomes legible and transferable: to every fragmented wetland in Kampala’s 30+ threatened systems, and to every city that needs to find its way back into right relation with the living place it inhabits.
What makes this guild capable of sustaining itself over time — rather than collapsing as when a grant cycle ends or an organisation moves on — is that it is structured as three simultaneous and mutually reinforcing lines of co-evolutionary work.
The first line influences personal evolution, through a mechanism of conversation as a means of learning: landowners, through the Obutaka Gathering Cycle, develop a renewed relation with their land — moving from seeing it as property to experiencing it as a living system that calls forth a caring responsibility; funders, through Funding Learning Journeys, examine their own relation with money, power, and impact — what they are unconsciously reproducing through the architecture they participate in, and what a different way of being in that architecture could make possible. Without this inner work, neither group can genuinely shift their practice; they revert to familiar patterns under pressure.
The second line influences relational evolution through a mechanism of learning as a means of coordination: landowners and funders, learning across the boundary that has always separated them, are drawn into coordination by a third presence — Nalubaaga herself. Developing the capacity to listen to a living ecosystem, to let her hydrological intelligence and the condition of her springs and biodiversity become a shared signal of whether the work is real, is what gives this line its harmonising force. It is harder to sustain the old separation between community and funder when both are oriented toward the same living place and accountable to the same evidence. From this shared listening, two forms of collective will begin to coordinate: landowners building the collective will for re-commoning land — moving from 530+ fragmented plots toward a co-stewarded bioregional commons; and funders building the collective will for re-commoning capital — re-patterning how capital flows, moving from isolated grant decisions made by isolated institutions toward a shared resourcing architecture that responds to what communities of life have already decided. This is the line that converts individual development into collective capability — two separate learning journeys, harmonised by a wetland, becoming one co-evolutionary movement.
The third line influences systemic evolution, through a mechanism of coordination as a means of system evolution: the whole of this guild’s work — the Cooperative, the Gathering Cycle, the Obuntu Resets, the Funding Learning Journeys — contributes something of real and transferable value to a larger whole: a demonstrated, working prototype of Relational Design as a discipline for urban bioregional health. What the guild produces is not a project. It is a living system with the growing capacity to keep regenerating itself — and through its own maturation, to offer the field of urban regeneration something it does not yet have.
Kiwaatule-2030 | Nalubaaga Bioregion | Kampala, Uganda | Regenar Development Initiative | www.regenar.org | www.obunturesets.com
love the Obutaka Gathering Cycle and the reset documents. I perceive you to be a fan of J G Bennett's tetrad!
This is awesome - so inspiring!