Hey ,

2025 has been a difficult year for the Caribbean. Hurricane Melissa devasted Western Jamaica and ravaged towns across the Greater Antilles, exposing how decades of austerity has left us vulnerable. The US carried out illegal military strikes in the Caribbean Sea, escalating into bombardments and the abduction of the Venezuelan president.

In times of unprecedented planetary disaster and crisis, we must  think globally but act locally. Our work must move from theory to praxis and demonstrate the collective transformations that we want to see and use these spaces as sites for collective learning and foundations for broader systems change.

Initiatives

In 2025, we have made significant progress in advancing our neighbourhood-scale civic infrastructure projects. These demonstration projects move our conceptual understanding of climate adaptation and waste management into practice that is embedded in local communities. 

Pathways to Urban  Nature Based Solutions aims to demonstrate how small to medium scale green infrastructure interventions can be deployed widely across Kingston.

In partnership with Arup, and with a goal of advancing green infrastructure, we completed construction of Phase 1 of the Abilities Foundation Living Lab green infrastructure (GI) pilot project. Alongside local landscape professionals, HEART Trust students and volunteers, we constructed two rain gardens, a bioswale, and other drainage infrastructure.

We have also completed a revision to the HEART Trust Landscaping curriculum to include GI best practices. We are exploring funding options to complete subsequent phases in 2026.

Participatory Solid Waste Management in Cassava Piece is a process of generating solutions in collaboration with community, this project is possible with support from the re:arc institute.

With support from the re:arc Institute, we have been working with community members in Cassava Piece to co-design a decentralized approach to solid waste management. Informed by an existing conditions analysis, we have completed a collaborative design process with community members and stakeholders that includes critical waste management infrastructure as well as public space improvements.

Now, with support from key stakeholders including the Municipal Corporation of Kingston & St. Andrew and the National Solid Waste Management Authority we are looking to begin prototyping of this solid waste management infrastructure in 2026.

The Seeing Heat Competition hosted in-person photo-basics workshops at UWI and at the Waterfront to give applicants  guidance on visually capturing extreme heat. 

As we explore new ways to investigate critical urban issues, we partnered with the Faculty of Science and Technology at UWI, to launch the Seeing Heat Photo competition. It aimed to visualise the invisible impacts of ever-increasing temperatures on towns & cities in Jamaica. Along with our chief judge, Jik Reuben Pringle we hosted virtual and in-person climate photography workshops and received over 100 submissions. Stay tuned as we will be announcing winners and hosting a public exhibition in the next few months.  

Forums

In 2025, we continued our partnership with the Caribbean School of Architecture and hosted the Emerging Practice Lecture Series. We featured Massiel Mejía Arquitectura del Paisaje a landscape architecture practice based in Santo Domingo, ByMaking, an industrial design practice in Port of Spain and Vernelle. A. A. Noel a computational designer raised Trinidad and Tobago but based in Pittsburgh.

Later in the year, we hosted our summer series Feeling the Heat, which explored how increasing temperatures across the region were affecting our built environment, public health, and livelihoods. Complimenting these webinars, we published interviews on the state of outdoor work in Jamaica and the region, and another on appropriate retrofits to cool self-built homes in the tropics.

Urban Dialogues was hosted at the National Gallery of Jamaica and included an architect-led tour of the Coronation Market. 

In July, we collaborated with the University of Amsterdam to host the Urban Dialogues: Imagining Kingston’s Futures, a conversation with local artists, journalists, planners, housing experts, and researchers from Amsterdam. The day-long event and activities asked the question- how is Kingston being (re)imagined through new infrastructure and cultural forms? We look forward to future exchanges in 2026 between our partners at the Urban Geography Department at the University of Amsterdam and Island City Lab. 

Romantic Urbanism analysed contemporary music and films like Harder They Come to see how the urban infrastructure informed romantic relationships. 

Provision Grounds Journal

Throughout the year, we continued our research exploration of more technical subject areas like parking, to expose how banal policies like parking mandates are rooted in psuedo-science and impact our lives in all-encompassing ways. More Parking, More Problems was a compilation of research we had conducted over the past two years and included land use data classification data obtained through our Nature-Based Solutions project. 

In February, we collaborated with Romantic Urbanism to publish Romantic Urbanism: Lovers Rock on their  platform. We explored how space and infrastructure across Jamaica influence romantic relationships as depicted in film, music, and TV.  

In August we published Town Stylin’, a piece that explored what the changing aesthetics of Downtown Shopping said about the city, its economy and our national development.

Last year we also launched our very first Call for Submissions to the Provision Grounds Journal. We received multiple abstracts on topics ranging from immigration, zinc sheets as a flexible building material, street graffiti, food systems & markets, public toilets and much more.

The first article published from this call was The Price of Paradise  which documented the personal stories of the founding families living along Bob Marley Beach and how their current battle to resist displacement fits within a broader trend of an increasing loss of public access to beaches, and coastlines across the Caribbean. In 2026, we hope to continue this by publishing a mixture of technical research as well as cultural and historical analysis of Caribbean cities and infrastructure.

Now more than ever, Caribbean cities need an entire ecosystem of practice working to expand access to the city for all. We are energized about building with you – thank you again for your collaboration. Stay tuned to more updates on ways to get involved. 

Dorraine Duncan

Executive Director

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Island City Lab is dedicated to collectively reshaping the narrative of Caribbean cities. Islands are some of the most urbanized places on earth. They are also the most vulnerable to economic and climate departure. How we plan, design and think about our cities needs to be relevant to this context.⁠

Your donation directly supports our efforts to address critical issues facing Caribbean cities through our research programs and community scale initiatives.

Our mission is to democratize all the processes that initiate, build, inform and manage our towns and cities. Join us as we move towards more resilient, sustainable, and inclusive urban environments that inspire generations to come.

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Provision Grounds curates new perspectives on island cities and how they are being made. We explore the relationships between the urban environment and culture, society, politics, and everyday life. Our features investigate issues of broad relevance through specific sites, projects, and stories centered in Caribbean cities.

Volunteer members from Cassava Piece Youth Club

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Island City Lab is a Caribbean-based urban think tank dedicated to understanding the unique features and challenges of small island cities. We want to improve our built environment by building, fostering, and mobilizing a network of civic thinkers to confront these challenges. If you are interested in this work we encourage you to follow us on social media and share & subscribe to our newsletter