Week 23: Designing the slum city of Nairobi, reviewing policy impacts 1920 - 2020

In discourse and legal scripts - Kenya is now a centenarian! It has been a century since the colony and protectorate of Kenya was designated on 11 June 1920 - marking the very first time the name "Kenya" was inked on legal paper.

[A section of Mukuru kwa Ruben slum, 9 February 2017. image credit - author]

The new colony inherited from the East African Protectorate an apartheid system that had established colonial race based segregation in the urban center of Nairobi since 1896. This set the city on a trajectory to cater for the select few with the needs of the majority low income African residents ignored. In the eyes of the colonial administrators, they were considered a town misfit and often nudged to go back to the village that was better suited for the African who, according to the imperialist, could only thrive in the farm areas whereas the city was a concrete jungle.

The same ideology replicated in the economic design with supporting institutions and infrastructure geared for an extractive regime where raw material was harvested, collated, minimally processed (mainly packaged) and shipped out by the minority colonialist bourgeoisie for whom value was realized by arbitraging commodity pricing between the British colony and the British state.

The declaration of the colony and protectorate, however, marked an interesting policy shift with the colonial government, for the first time, recognized its emerging challenge as effectively addressing the needs of the majority African populace citing education as a strategy to help the African person "see the light". Inevitably, left to the imperialist to address the needs of the African majority was tantamount to a wolf tending the sheep!

History casts a long shadow to the ineffectiveness of the policies and institutions then set in place to meet the basic needs of food, shelter, health and appropriate education for the majority African populace.

The case of low income housing sticks out like a sore thumb revealing the persistence of slums since the establishment of Nairobi in 1896.

Prior to the 1923 white paper, guided by the colonial apartheid ideology, the majority low income laborers of the new railway town were left to fend for their own shelter. This precipitated slums as early as the turn of the 20th century and triggered the culture of informality and illegality of low income housing with unsanitary living conditions in the Eastern side of Pangani, Masikini, Kaburini and Mombasa (Hake, 1977) away from the 90% segregated zones which were mapped on race and class lines.

Inevitably, as the unsanitary living conditions of the majority led to periodic outbreaks of disease, segregation was further justified as a means of controlling the spread of communicable diseases to the British superiors (Morgan, 1968). The initial solution of razing down slums was repeated numerously in the lead up to the World War period.

Following the 1923 white paper bringing to fore the need to consider African interests there was a trickle down need for Nairobi to recognize and accommodate its majority African residents.

Laughably though, in the 1st town plan prepared in 1927 and subsequently revised in 1948, the colonial authorities zoned out just 1% of Nairobi for the African majority. The 1% was justified on the basis of the temporary, transitory nature of Africans who would eventually go back home after completing their short term urban assignments.(Hall, 2014).

After the World War II, Nairobi’s spatial character changed dramatically. With the labour party coming to power in Britain in 1945, the desire to improve the socio – economic conditions of the colonized was emboldened. This led to a change in the urban housing policy with 317 site and service plots in Pumwani set up for the African Natives elites with longer term engagements in the city based on the Soweto South Africa model (Hake, 1977).

The 1950’s saw the agitation for independence and slums were seen as harboring Mau Mau dissidents. To contain the uprising within the city, colonial authorities razed down various slums including Pangani. Many affected residents relocated to Mathare valley leading to its mushrooming that was repeatedly spared from demolition on account of dominant ethnicity and patronage. To contain the radicalization on the lines of ‘detribalization’ and ‘nationalisms’ of the masses, ethnic groups were forcefully relocated to recreate ethnically homogenous settlements that resulted in dominant tribes in various slums - a situation persistent today (Masilwa, 2016). In addition to racial and disease prevention justifications, marginalization of the African urban poor and their housing needs was now seen as an effort to maintaining law and order (Masilwa, 2016).

Independence and the abolition of various laws restricting native movement saw the massive migration from the rural to the urban exacerbating the housing shortage. The young capital deficient government at the crossroads of pitching Nairobi as an investment friendly, beautiful “city in the sun” or provide ‘low standard’ ‘ugly’ housing for the urban poor went with the former. This informed the very first sessional paper (GoK, 1967) on housing policy that advocated for standard quality housing and slum clearance aimed at ‘cleaning up the city’.

The newly developed flats, such as the high rise California estate that was supposedly replacing Pumwani slums accommodated just a fraction of the initial slum residents affected by the clearance leading to gentrification of the majority . This, coupled with the ever persistent rural – urban migration pressure, led to emergence of even more slums as well as the resilient re-emergence of bulldozed settlements - phenomena persistent to date.

The perception that slums would eventually go away with urbanization promoted a laissez faire attitude to addressing the slumification of Nairobi city. 

With growing demand to address urban low income housing on the one hand, and poorly managed cash strapped governments on the other hand, in came (Turner & Fichter, 1972) individualized self-help proposal that was eventually formally adopted by the World Bank (Mayo & Angel, 1993) compelling governments into structural adjustments programs that would limit their role in provision of low income housing.

The Turner neoliberal ‘site and service’ plan specifically targeted the urban poor seeking to improve their water and sanitation as well as meet their need for basic shelter. The plan modeled out incremental developments ensuring affordability as well as full cost recoveries.The first of these urban projects in Nairobi was 6,000 plots in Dandora in 1975, followed by Mathare North, Kayole, New Kibera tenant purchase and Ayany. However, in light of the 1973 Nairobi master plan that accentuated the 1948 plan to pursue the “green city in the sun” these urban projects were intentionally designated to the periphery the capital’s center away from tourist and elitist’s sight (Emig, 1980). This meant they were far away from the economic opportunities making residing in a slum close to the city center or industrial area a viable choice that was increasingly taken up by the urban poor.

With the state abdicating its affordable housing role following pressure to adopt neoliberal prescriptions from multilateral donors, slums mushroomed from the 1980’s and housing conditions in the city deteriorating rapidly(Masilwa, 2016). The 1990’s saw the strengthening of the slum residents voice with notable insitu developments such as the Mathare 4A. However, by this time, slumlordship had taken root and over 90% of the slum residents were (and still are) rent - paying tenants in virtually all major slums in the city.

The 2000’s have seen a mix of government renewed effort to play a leading role in formulating policies and implementing proof of concepts in slum upgrading efforts. The Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) initiated in 2002 and the Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Project (KISIP) launched in June 2011 were setup with a target of improving 1.6 million slum household by 2020 at a cost of approximately KShs. 884 Billion (approximately $8.8 billion) (Muraguri, 2012). These saw the implementation of the National Housing Corporation (NHC) Kibera High Rise project in 2004 as well as 822 housing units in Soweto, Kibera and 245 market stalls[1]. The outcome falls way short of targeted goals and hardly address a fraction of the problem.

In a renewed effort, GoK in 2017 listed affordable housing in its big four agenda with the target of building 500,000 affordable home units in five years[2]. The initiative incorporates housing unit from the ongoing KENSUP and Nairobi urban renewal program[3] to provide a central platform for monitoring delivery of housing units as well as formulating strategies to enable delivery of affordable housing units.

The dominance of the neoliberal configuration of ownership and marketization is apparent with over 90% of units designated for sale to individuals through affordable mortgage solutions. A paltry 15,000 units have been designated for social housing contrasted to the estimated 500,000 Nairobi city households living in unsanitary slums.

It's an almost realized prophecy what the inevitable outcome will be.

Interestingly the national and county strategies do not consider affordable rental housing as a pathway for provision of adequate housing for the majority low income urban residents (Omenya, et al., 2020) bulwarking the current reality of a dominant private rental market serving over 85% of the entire Nairobi City population (Gulyani et al., 2018).

[1] Based on report from Government of Kenya state department of housing and urban development available on http://housingandurban.go.ke/kenya-slum-upgrading-programme-kensup/

[2] See http://www.president.go.ke/

[3] The Nairobi urban renewal program seeks to densify the current city county owned housing units 5 - fold from the current 16,632 units to nearly 70,000 modern affordable housing units on multiple plots cumulatively covering 475 hectares across the city

Reference

Emig, S. (1980). Notes on the urban planning of Nairobi . Copenhagen: Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architectur.

GoK. (1967). Session paper No. 5 of 1966/7: Housing policy for Kenya Nairobi: Government of Kenya. Nairobi: Government printer.

Gulyani, S., Talukdar, D., & Bassett, E. M. (2018). A sharing economy? Unpacking demand and living conditions in the urban housing market in Kenya. World Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.04.007

Hake, A. (1977). African Metropolis: Nairobi's self-help city (Vol. 1). Toronto: Clarke, Irwin: Chatto and Windus for Sussex University Press.

Hall, P. (2014). cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design since 1880. In Bmj.

Hart, K. (1970). 8. Small-scale Entrepreneurs in Ghana and Development Planning. The Journal of Development Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220387008421338

Mayo, S. K., & Angel, S. (1993). Housing: enabling markets to work. Housing: Enabling Markets to Work.

Masilwa, J. K. (2016). Housing and Governance: Perspectives, Policy and Practice in Global South Cities The Case of Nairobi. Berlin: PhD Thesis, The Institute for Technology and Resources Management in the Tropics and Subtropics (ITT), TH Köln.

Morgan, W. T. (1968). Nairobi: City and Region. Oxford : Oxford University Press.

Muraguri, L. (2012). Kenyan Government Initiatives in Slum Upgrading. Les cahiers d’Afrique de l’est,, 119-128.

Omenya, A., Cap, C., Wesonga, G., Esho, L., Mwaura, N. N., Nyole, F., . . . Otieno, J. (2020). Toward the just city in Kenya. Nairobi: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung

Turner, J. F. C., & Fichter, R. (1972). Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process. Urban Studies.