Examines the making and remaking of Nairobi, one of Africa's most
fragmented, vibrant cities, contributing to debates on urban
anthropology, the politics of the past and postcolonial materialities.
What does it mean to make a life in an African city today? How do
ordinary Africans, surrounded by collapsing urban infrastructures and
amid fantastical promises of hypermodern, globalised futures, try to
ensure a place for themselves in the city's future? Exploring the
relationship between the remains of empire and the global city, and
themes of urban belonging and exclusion, housing and security, Constance
Smith examines the making and remaking of one ofAfrica's most
fragmented, vibrant cities.
Nairobi is on the cusp of radical urban change. As in other capital
cities across Africa, the Kenyan government has launched "Vision 2030",
an urban megaproject that envisions the capital as a "world class
metropolis", a spectacular new node in a network of global cities. Yet
as a city born of British colonialism, Nairobians also live amongst the
dilapidated vestiges of imperial urban planning; spaces designed to
regulate urban subjects. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a
dilapidated, colonial-era public housing project built as a model urban
neighbourhood but which is now slated for demolition, Smith explores how
projects of self-making and city-making are entwined. She traces how it
is through residents' everyday lives - in the mundane, incremental work
of home maintenance, in the accumulation of stories about the past, in
ordinary people's aspirations for the future - that urban landscapes are
formed, imaginatively, materially and unpredictably, across time.
Nairobi emerges as a place of pathways and plans, obstructions and
aspirations, residues and endurances, thatinflect the way that ordinary
people produce the city, generating practices of historymaking, ideas
about urban belonging and attempts to refashion "Vision 2030" into a
future more meaningful and inclusive to ordinary city dwellers.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda: Twaweza Communications
