urban · periurban
Fumba Town
- Location
- Fumba Peninsula, Zanzibar
- Year
- 2017–ongoing
- Area
- Flagship masterplan
- Client
- CPS Fumba
- Services
- consulting · design · implementation · maintenance · training
- Status
- Ongoing (flagship)
Fumba Town is East Africa's first planned eco-development, and our flagship engagement. We have been the landscape partner since 2017, designing and implementing the green spine that turns a coastal master plan into a living, climate-adaptive neighborhood.
Context
The site sits on coral rag soil on Zanzibar's south-west coast - thin, alkaline, fast-draining. Rainfall is concentrated in two short seasons, and coastal wind strips young plantings. Any landscape strategy here has to start with soil, water, and shelter.
Challenge
Conventional municipal landscaping - imported topsoil and ornamental palms on irrigation timers - would have been fragile, thirsty, and silent. Fumba needed a green public realm that could establish quickly, survive the dry season without mains water, feed people, host wildlife, and grow more beautiful with each passing year.
Design strategy
- Climate-responsive forest system. We curated 120+ indigenous and naturalized species, sequenced specifically for temperature regulation, drought resilience, and coastal wind protection.
- Ecosystem services framework. Multifunctional landscapes that reintroduce species previously displaced on the site, create wildlife corridors through productive gardens, and integrate flood-mitigating earthworks into the street pattern.
- Superadobe play structures. Child-friendly community spaces built from stabilized earth, demonstrating that low-carbon construction belongs alongside high-performance landscape.
- Cooling water gardens. A network of ponds and infiltration features that increases biodiversity while passively cooling adjacent buildings.
- Community gathering nodes. Shaded plazas with edible landscaping, designed so that a walk to the shops is also a walk through fruit trees.
“Fumba Town has become a living laboratory for tropical urban resilience, proving that development and ecology can thrive together.”
- Fumba Town
Lessons from the land
Documented temperature reductions of seven to ten degrees under canopy, increasing pollinator sightings each season, and an emerging precedent for what regenerative urban development can look like in East Africa. Fumba taught us that a master plan, given time and the right species, becomes an ecosystem.