Living Markets

Competition Brief

Living Markets is the sixth edition of the NowNow Design Competition, organised in partnership with ICLEI Africa and in collaboration with C40 Cities. The competition invites designers, students, urbanists, and anyone with an interest in the built environment to reimagine two of Kenya’s most active fresh produce markets — Wakulima Market in Nairobi and Jubilee Market in Kisumu — as resilient, well-managed civic infrastructure capable of supporting healthy diets, local economic development, and a thriving urban life. Registration opens 1 September 2026.

Proposals feed directly into ICLEI Africa’s ReMark Initiative and Nairobi’s commitment under the C40 Thriving Food Systems Accelerator, which targets the comprehensive transformation of ten major city markets over seven years. The competition is not an academic exercise: shortlisted ideas will inform real investment decisions for market upgrades across African cities.

Intent

Approximately 80% of food consumed in African cities moves through traditional markets, yet most of these operate within ageing infrastructure that limits food safety, climate resilience, and economic performance. The competition responds to a structural gap: municipal administrators are asked to manage complex retail food environments without adequate funding, policy support, or staffing capacity — while multinational supermarket chains offer local governments an easy alternative that concentrates wealth and displaces informal traders. The brief positions design as a tool to counter that trajectory: not by replacing existing markets, but by retrofitting and strengthening what is already there.

Purpose

The competition explicitly warns against the “white elephant” trap — costly new market buildings constructed on city peripheries, disconnected from established trading networks, that stand largely empty. The lesson drawn from failed relocations, including an earlier attempt to redevelop Wakulima Market, is that successful transformation requires designing with markets rather than designing new ones. Winning and shortlisted entries will be published across NowNow’s platforms and shared with associated architecture publications, and will directly inform ICLEI Africa’s ReMark financing approach for future market investments.

Requirements

Participants select one site — either Wakulima Market (Nairobi) or Jubilee Market (Kisumu) — and develop a proposal across two A2 portrait panels submitted as a single PDF. Panel A presents a future spatial vision for the chosen market (site plan). Panel B details a modular upgrade element and demonstrates how it can be replicated and implemented. A 300-word project description is submitted separately via the upload portal. All panels must be in English, must not identify the entrant, and must display the assigned competition code in the bottom-right corner. One entry per registration fee; additional submissions require additional fees. Site plans, photographs, and 3D models for both markets are available in the competition information pack on the NowNow website.

Jury

The jury for the Living Markets edition has not been announced at time of publication. NowNow’s previous editions have assembled practitioners drawn from urban development, architecture, community organisations, and municipal institutions — with jurors selected per competition theme. The organisers reserve the right to substitute any jury member with an equivalently qualified and impartial replacement. Jury decisions are final and cannot be challenged. Contact: info@nownowcompetition.com.

Registration Fees

The brief confirms that a single registration fee applies regardless of team size. Accepted payment methods: Paystack, PayPal, and bank transfer. Additional entries require separate fees. Register and submit via nownowcompetition.com.

Prizes and Rewards

Prize amounts are drawn from the official competition brief PDF. Note: the competition landing page lists the first prize as $2,500 — a discrepancy with the brief figure of $2,000. Verify the current amount at nownowcompetition.com before registering. Prizes are disbursed via bank transfer or PayPal following identity verification and acceptance of all terms. NowNow covers its own bank commissions; any fees charged by the winner’s bank or currency conversion costs are the winner’s responsibility. All awarded and shortlisted projects will be published on NowNow’s website, Instagram, LinkedIn, and associated architecture platforms.

Key Dates

✦ ArchUp Competition Review

The Living Markets brief is one of the most substantively grounded open calls in recent memory. It does not invent a problem — it documents one with precision: Wakulima Market operates at three to six times its original design capacity, generates 400 tonnes of unmanaged organic waste daily, and sustains 250,000 informal workers without basic social protection. Jubilee Market has served Kisumu for nearly nine decades from a single-storey structure with inadequate drainage, no cold storage, and open waste burning. These are not design prompts — they are functioning urban crises that affect millions of people.

What distinguishes this edition from a purely speculative exercise is the institutional pipeline behind it. ICLEI Africa’s ReMark Initiative and Nairobi’s C40 Thriving Food Systems Accelerator commitment provide a credible channel through which winning ideas can reach actual investment decisions. NowNow has demonstrated across five previous editions — from Lagos to Cape Town — that its competition model produces work that reaches real stakeholders, not just portfolios.

The two-panel submission format is disciplined and appropriate: a spatial vision paired with a replicable modular element. This is not a brief asking for a signature building — it asks for a toolkit. That distinction matters. Designers who approach this as a monument competition will miss the point entirely. The “white elephant” warning embedded in the brief is unusually frank for a competition document and signals that the organisers understand the history of failed market interventions on the continent.

The unresolved discrepancy between the first-prize figure on the landing page ($2,500) and the brief PDF ($2,000) is a minor but real issue that participants should clarify before registering. Registration fee amounts are also absent from all published materials at time of writing — a gap that should be addressed by the organisers before September 2026.

Final Thoughts

Living Markets is NowNow’s sixth edition — an open international competition focused on two Kenyan fresh produce markets: Wakulima (Nairobi) and Jubilee (Kisumu). Participants choose one site and submit two A2 portrait panels as a single PDF, plus a 300-word description via the upload portal. Registration opens 1 September 2026; the registration window closes 21 February 2027 and submissions close 28 February 2027 at 24:00 CAT. Results are announced 31 March 2027. Register and submit at nownowcompetition.com. Contact: info@nownowcompetition.com.

Registration Deadline

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