The phenomenon of Informal Urbanisation has become the single most pervasive element of city
making in developing countries. The city of Nairobi presents such an urban paradigm. It has
however been shown that this urban process is heterogeneous and not homogeneous as
propagated by many scholars/researchers. This book raises questions about the role of informality
on the urban process of the city of Nairobi. From its establishment, Nairobi's urbanisation has
always been characterised by dualism; formal and informal. I argue that informal urbanisation is
defined by spatial strategies rather than legal/economic distinctions. The book examines the
dynamics of the urbanisation process through case studies, in the four categories of informalities;
survival, primary, intermediate and affluent. Diverse Informalities have shown that the informal
phenomenon is not entirely negative, as it provides some form of urban livelihood for the poor.
This book will be a resource to; Academics in urbanism, Architects and Planners. It will also be
useful to urban managers/administrators, policy makers and development agencies among others.
Oslo School of Architecture (AHO)
Doctoral Thesis.
Institute of Urbanism
March 2006
i
Tom J C Anyamba
“Diverse Informalities”;
Spatial Transformations in Nairobi.
A study of Nairobi’s Urban Process
Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Oslo – Norway
All Illustrations unless otherwise stated have been prepared by the author.
ii
ABSTRACT
This thesis raises questions about the role of informality on the urbanisation process of
the city of Nairobi. From its establishment, more than 100 years ago as a transit point for
the Uganda Railway, Nairobi’s urbanisation has always been characterised by dualism;
formal and informal. Over the years the informal phenomenon has proved to be quite
resilient, and has had a profound impact on the urbanisation of Nairobi in the last 30
years or so. Informality has been found to be heterogeneous and not homogeneous as
articulated in most literature, and for Nairobi, all socio-economic classes undertake
informal processes which I have called Diverse Informalities.
I argue that informal urbanisation is defined by spatial strategies rather than
legal/economic distinctions. I further make a critique of the legal framework, by
reconceptualising the phenomenon through a spatial framework, where space is at the
core of the urban processes. Evidence has shown that informal practices manipulate and
take advantage of the weaknesses of the legal framework, through spatial strategies.
The research examines the dynamics of the urbanisation processes in Nairobi through
case studies, in the four categories of informalities, categorised as; survival, primary,
intermediate and affluent. These studies provide a more nuanced and accurate description
of the informal urban processes in Nairobi, and also show the centrality of space in
these processes.
The transformations in the Mumias South Corridor, an example of intermediate
informalities, illustrate how formal urban settlements gradually informalise over time.
They also show the spatial strategies taken by the transformers, which generate new
hybrid urbanity. Diverse Informalities have shown that the informal phenomenon is not
entirely negative, as it provides some form of urban livelihood for the poor. This thesis
also reasserts the centrality of space, and relevance of design in the discussion of the
phenomenon of informality.
Key words: Urbanism, Informality, Colonial, Spatial, Diverse, Transformations.
iii
CONTENTS
Abstract
iii
Contents
iv
List of Figures
v
List of Tables
xii
Acronyms
xiii
Acknowledgements
xiv
1. Introduction
1
•
Problem Statement
1
•
Objectives of study
2
•
Research Questions
2
•
Justification of Study
3
•
Methods
3
•
Sources of Data
4
•
Choice of Case Studies
5
•
Methodological Problems
7
•
Organisation of Monograph
7
2. Theoretical and Conceptual Framework
•
Introduction
•
The Discourse Rooted in Architecture,
•
•
•
8
8
Design and Planning
9
The Discourse Rooted in Urban Social Theory
10
o
Early European Urban Theorists
10
o
The Chicago School
12
o
Contemporary Theorists
13
The Discourse Rooted in Colonial and Traditional
Urban Processes
17
The Discourse Rooted in the Informal Urban Process
20
o
Evolution of the Concept of Informality
20
iv
o
Other Debates on Informality
•
Re-conceptualising Urbanity in Developing Countries
•
The Evolution of Policies Towards
Informal Urbanisation
•
•
•
42
Settlement Demolition Policies
42
o
Regularisation Policies
44
o
Enablement Policies
47
Re-conceptualising Informality
(The Case of “Diverse Informalities)
49
Informality and the Centrality of Space
53
Colonial Nairobi
58
58
o
Introduction
58
o
The Founding Years 1899-1905
58
o
The Consolidation Period 1906-1926
64
o
The Intermediate Period 1927- 1946
70
o
The Period of Decline
74
Post-Colonial Nairobi
81
o
Overall Urban Process
81
o
Production and Consumption of Space
91
o
Planning, Regularisation and Upgrading
97
4. Diverse Informalities
•
27
o
3. The Urban History of Nairobi
•
24
Introduction
o
Common Traits in these Informalities
105
105
106
•
Survivalist Informalities
108
•
Primary Informalities
118
o
Market Stalls (exhibitions) in the CBD
120
o
Alecky Fish and Food Kiosk
121
o
Hollywood Garage
126
o
Mukuru Kwa Njenga Informal Settlement
128
v
o Informal Settlements in General
137
•
Intermediate Informalities
140
•
Affluent Informalities
153
5. Informalising the Formal
162
•
Introduction
162
•
Evolution of Buru Buru
163
•
Planning and Development Control Measures
In Buru Buru
169
•
Urban Edge Definition
170
•
Informalising the Formal
175
o
Commercial Transformations
177
o
Residential Transformations
185
o
Residential cum Commercial Transformations
194
o
Transformations of the Shopping Centre
203
o
Transformations of the “Mausoleum”
206
o
Other Transformations
209
6. Conclusions
211
•
Summary
211
•
The Urban Process in Nairobi
211
•
Re-conceptualising Informality
214
•
Merits and Demerits of Informality
216
•
Creating a Different Urbanity
220
•
Urban Integration
224
•
A Critique of Regularisation Policies
227
•
The Role of Design in Settlements
228
7. Bibliography
236
8. Appendices
248
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1 Nairobi’s Urbanisation Study Model
51
Figure 3.1 Contextual Location of Nairobi
60
3.2 Layout of Nairobi c1900
61
3.3 Layout of Nairobi c1905
63
3.4 Evolution of Biashara Street
64
3.5 Layout of Nairobi c1926
67
3.6 Pumwani: Layout Plan and View
69
3.7 Nairobi Municipal Area c1927
70
3.8 Grid Layout of Eastleigh
73
3.9 1948 Nairobi Central Area
76
3.10 Typical Layout – Neighbourhood Unit
78
3.11 Nairobi City Area 1964
83
3.12 Traffic Jam on Haile Selassie Avenue
85
3.13 NHC’s Tenant Purchase Housing – Pumwani
87
3.14 Matatu Transport – Ronal Ngala/Mfangano Streets
88
3.15 Transformations in Dandora
90
3.16 Informal Modernism – Block 10, Embakasi
91
3.17 Matatu Terminal – Central Bus Station
92
3.18 Informal Nairobi
93
3.19 High Rise Blocks – Mathare North
94
3.20 Transformations of Umoja
96
3.21 Consolidated Enterprise – Block 10
98
3.22 Images of Mathare 4A
101
3.23 Three Dimensional Upgrading – Huruma
102
3.24 Partial Layout – Typical Informal Settlement
103
Figure 4.1 Mama Mboga – South B
4.2 Roadside Flower Pots
112
112
vii
4.3 Roadside Tree Nursery
112
4.4 Blacksmiths
113
4.5 Shoe/Clothes Vendor
113
4.6 Mutindwa Petty Traders
114
4.7 Evolution of a Kiosk
115
4.8 Roadside Maize Roaster
116
4.9 Shauri Moyo – Blacksmiths
116
4.10 Laini-Saba – Traders
116
4.11 Assorted Hardware Dealers
117
4.12 Interior, Nairobi Stalls – Moi Avenue
121
4.13 Stalls – Tom Mboya Street
121
4.14 Kiosks on Road Reserve
124
4.15 Exterior and Interior – Alecky Food Kiosk
124
4.16 Outdoor Fish Stand
125
4.17 A Collage of Kiosks
125
4.18 Hollywood Garage Shed
126
4.19 Clients’ Vehicles
126
4.20 Informal Water Point
128
4.21 Mukuru Kwa Njenga Settlement
129
4.22 Evolution of Mukuru Kwa Njenga
130
4.23 Typical Dwelling – Mukuru Kwa Njenga
132
4.24 Entrance Area – Andimi’s “House”
133
4.25 Interior – Andimi’s “House”
133
4.26 Dwellings under Power Lines
134
4.27 Commercial Pit Latrines
134
4.28 Garbage Heap
134
4.29 Unpaved Roads/Footpaths
136
4.30 Private Health Clinic
136
4.31 Private School (“Academy”)
136
4.32 Location of Informal Settlements
138
4.33 Mathare 4A Dwellings
138
viii
4.34 Roadside Furniture Vending
139
4.35 Matatu Transport
139
4.36 Boulevard – Jamhuri I
143
4.37 High Rise Blocks – Jamhuri II
143
4.38 Fruit Vendor
143
4.39 Jamhuri II - Plot Subdivision Layout
144
4.40 Time Series Images – Jamhuri II
145
4.41 Typical Section – Kinuthia House
148
4.42 Ground Floor Plan – Kinuthia House
148
4.43 First Floor Plan
149
4.44 Entrance View – Kinuthia House
149
4. 45 Stair Detail – Kinuthia House
149
4.46 3 Storey Flats – Jamhuri II
150
4.47 6 Storey Developments – Jamhuri II
150
4.48 Urban Edge Definition
150
4.49 Struggle for Identity
151
4.50 Visual Articulation
151
4.51 Urban agriculture
152
4.52 Main Access Road
152
4.53 Morphological Transformations of Runda
155
4.54 Typical Plot Subdivision – Runda
156
4.55 Layout – Old Runda
157
4.56 Village Market
158
4.57 Food Court – Village Market
158
4.58 Water Fountain – Village Market
158
4.59 Shopping Arcade – Village Market
159
4.60 Main Entrance – Village Market
159
4.61 Aerial View and Site Plan – Plot 97
159
4.62 Ground Floor Plan – Plot 97
160
4.63 First Floor Plan – Plot 97
160
4.64 Sections and Elevations – Plot 97
161
ix
Figure 5.1 0m Setback – Phase 1
162
5.2 0m Setback – Phase 2
162
5.3 9m Setback – Phase 4
163
5.4 Transformed 9m Setback – Phase 5
163
5.5 Transformations of Buru Buru
165
5.6 Partial Layout – Mumias South Corridor
168
5.7 Urban Edge Definition 2
171
5.8 Commercial Transformation
172
5.9 Residential Transformations
172
5.10 Commercial cum Residential Transformations
172
5.11 Urban Edge Definition 3
174
5.12 Layout – Cluster A
175
5.12b Layout Cluster A – Phase 4 Junction
176
5.13 Transformations on 2/496
178
5.14 Transformations on 2/858
180
5.15 Transformation on 4/174
181
5.16 Balcony on 2/496
182
5.17 Drying Area 2/858
183
5.18 Annexed Passage Adjacent to 2/858
183
5.19 Entrance -.Drycleaners 2/858
183
5.20 Millennium Clinic Access 4/174
184
5.21 Dental Room 4/174
184
5.22 Entrance Area 4/174
184
5.23 Reception 4/174
184
5.24 Transformations on 4/201
186
5.25 Entrance View 4/201
187
5.26 Lawn/Drying Area 4/201
187
5.27 View from Access Road 4/201
188
5.28 Transformations on 5/437
189
5.29 Original and Transformed Constructions 5/437
190
5.30 View from Spine Road 5/437
191
x
5.31 Interior – Hair Saloon 5/437
191
5.32 Ample Car Parking 5/437
192
5.33 Transformations - Cluster B
193
5.34 Double Storey Extensions – Cluster B
194
5.35 Demolished 3-Storey Extension
194
5.36 Transformations on 2/814
195
5.37 Video Library 2/814
196
5.38 New Architectural Character
196
5.39 Transformations 4/281
198
5.40 Narrow Gap between Old and New
199
5.41 Cantilevered Balconies
199
5.42 Transformations on 4/284
200
5.43 Interior – Cyber Café 4/284
201
5.44 Interior – Hair Saloon 4/284
201
5.45 Phased Transformations 4/284
202
5.46 Shopping Centre 2003
203
5.47 Shopping Centre Transformations – Cluster D
204
5.48 External Balconies Internalised
205
5.49 Informal Market
205
5.50 Transformations – “Mausoleum”
207
5.51 Ukweli Fabricators
208
5.52 Buru Buru Centre
208
5.53 Recent Developments
209
5.54 Supermarket – Tusker Mattresses
209
5.55 Tents Pub – Interior
209
5.56 Converted Disused Container
209
5.57 Tents and Winds Pubs
210
Figure 6.1 Commercial High Rise Developments
219
6.2 Cerda’s Minimum Urb
230
6.3 Typical Courtyard Layout – Buru Buru
231
xi
6.4 Sections – Professional Intervention
232
6.5 Sections – Design Options
234
6.6 Sections and Layout – Design Options
235
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1. Nairobi’s Area and Population
82
2. Residential and Population Densities
84
3. Categories and Salient Attributes of Diverse Informalities
107
4. Global Development Paradigms and Their Characteristics
221
xii
ACRONYMS
AHO
Oslo School of Architecture
CARDO Centre for Architectural Research and Development Overseas
CBD
Central Business District
CBS
Central Bureau of Statistics
CIAM International Congress of Modern Architecture
HBE
Home Based Enterprise
HRDU Housing Research and Development Unit
MGS
Metropolitan Growth Strategy
MNC
Multi National Corporation
NACHU National Cooperative Housing Union
NCC
Nairobi City Council
NHC
National Housing Corporation
NISCC
Nairobi Informal Settlements Coordination Committee
NUFU
Norwegian Council for Higher Education
SAPs
Structural Adjustment Programmes
SEARCH
Southern and Eastern Africa Research Cooperation for Habitat
UNCHS United Nations Centre for Human Settlements.
UNDP
UON
United Nations Development Programme
University of Nairobi
xiii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank the Norwegian Council for Higher Education (NUFU), and the Higher Education
Loans Board (Lånekassen), for funding the doctoral study and the writing of this
dissertation. I am indebted to the SEARCH team of; Sven Erik Svendsen, Ola Stave,
Steinar Eriksrud and Inger Lise Syversen, for initiating the co-operation between
Norwegian and African Universities, a co=operation that led to this study. I thank the
University of Nairobi for granting me study leave, and for enabling me to come to Oslo
to pursue this study. In particular I wish to thank the Chairman Department of
Architecture, UON, for facilitating the carrying out of empirical studies.
My advisors at AHO; Karl Otto Ellefsen and Edward Robbins guided and gave me
insightful remarks throughout the study period, and I wish to thank them. I acknowledge
the criticism of Winnie Mitullah, my UON advisor, which helped shape this thesis. I also
acknowledge the support of the PhD programme staff at AHO; Halina Dunin-Woyseth,
for her guidance during the research education phase and Ingunn Gjørva for handling all
administrative matters. Many thanks to Berit Skjaervold for taking care of visas, permits
and loans, and the AHO IT team for making sure that all was well with computers.
The input of Jarrett Odwallo and Joseph Mukeku in data collection is also recognised
plus the work of Evans Otieno, who tirelessly digitised all the drawings of this study. My
gratitude and recognition to the settlers of Mukuru Kwa Njenga, Jamhuri II, Buru Buru
and Runda, who are creating a different urbanity, that has informed this thesis. My
colleagues on the PhD programme; Wilson Awour, Tom Sanya, Ezekiel Moshi and
Cyracius Lwamayanga added value to my stay in Oslo.
The larger Anyamba family in the Diaspora has always supported and encouraged me,
and I wish to thank them. I thank my son Anyamba, daughters Iranji and Kadenge for
their understanding and patience while I was away. Last but not least, I thank my wife
Nyaranga, for her patience and endurance of my long absences, and for taking
responsibility of the family during this period. Finally I take all the responsibility for any
shortcomings of this thesis.
xiv
1. INTRODUCTION
Problem Statement
The phenomenon of informal urbanisation has become the single most pervasive element
in the production of cities in developing countries. The shear magnitude of this modality
of city making has rendered it as the norm rather than the exception in the growth of
contemporary cities (Castillo, 2000:2). The city of Nairobi represents such an urban
paradigm, with an area of approximately 690km² and a population of over 3 million
people, where 60% of the population lives in informal settlements. Further more, this
60% of the population is crammed into only 5% of Nairobi’s residential land area, on
land which is predominantly marginal (Matrix Development Consultants, 1993; NISCC,
1997; Syagga, 2002).
Informality has become the basis for city making in Nairobi for the last 30 years or so, as
opposed to formal development. This urban process, however I will argue is not
homogeneous as alluded to by most literature but rather heterogeneous. It is this informal
heterogeneous urban process taking place in Nairobi that I seek to unpack.
Ordinarily, the phenomenon of informality has been associated with the urban poor,
based on the ecological theories of the “Chicago School”.
Their successors, the neo-liberal urban economists, regarded slums as the natural
response of the market in providing housing for poor people: the housing they can
afford. Poverty and slums are closely related and mutually reinforcing (UNCHS,
2003:2).
Other scholars have seen the phenomenon of informality as the source of illegality. In
this regard, Mitullah and Kibwana have argued differently, they posit that illegality can
be conceptualised purely on professional lines:
The cities which the poor build and in which they live and work are different from
and unrelated to what the city authorities want built (Mitullah and Kibwana, in
Fernandes and Varley, 1998: 193).
Hernando De Soto on the other hand argues that the phenomenon of informality should
be seen through the prism of capital. He posits that because most people in Third World
and ex-communist countries are unable to capitalise their property, they resort to
1
extralegal arrangements of carrying out their businesses in the absence of affordable legal
means.
These arrangements however have a disadvantage in that they are not
integrated into the formal property system and as a result are not fungible
and adaptable to most transactions; they are not connected into financial
and investment circuits; and their members are not accountable to
authorities outside their own social contract (De Soto, 2001: 90).
These concepts of city making are what I set out to investigate using the city of Nairobi.
The study of informality through legal and capitalistic frameworks will be addressed, but
much more important, I plan to add the spatial dimension to this study, which I hope
will make the debate more holistic. This is in recognition of the fact that informal urban
processes do not take place in a vacuum, but rather in space. This study will also
investigate whether players/actors in informal processes take legal or spatial strategies
in their effort of accessing urban goods and services.
Objectives of Study
The main objective of the study is to try and unpack the informal urban processes
generating the urban fabric of Nairobi. In this regard a clear understanding of the
informal spatial transformations taking place in all spheres of society is sought. The study
also aims at documenting some informal transformations that have taken place in Nairobi
in the last 30years or so. In conclusion, mitigating factors/variables for this urban
condition will be addressed.
Research Questions
The main research questions are:•
How and why is the informal urbanisation process taking place in Nairobi?
•
Who are the key players and variables in this process?
•
What is the impact of this process on Nairobi’s urban fabric?
•
What measures can be put in place to mitigate this urban condition?
2
Justification of Study
The study of the informal urban process with an emphasis on the spatial dimension of
informality will contribute to the literature on human settlements. This study will also go
beyond the traditional boundaries, where informality has been associated with the urban
poor. By examining the informal urban process taking place among the middle and high
income groups in Nairobi, new insights on the phenomenon of informality, it is envisaged
will be unveiled. The detailed study focusing on informalising the formal (ex-formal),
and the intermediate informalities producing new settlements, will generate new
epistemological underpinnings of informality, further enhancing our understanding of the
phenomenon of informality.
Methods
This study combines grounded theory and case study methods. Grounded theory allows
for the development of theory through different stages of data collection and the
refinement and interrelationships of categories of information (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).
The development of theory is not the origin but rather the outcome of the research. While
certain analytical concepts surface during the research process, they are always
challenged, compared, and thought of in non-standard ways. The purpose of using a
grounded theory method is to close the gap between theory and empirical research.
Portes speaks of grounded theory as “the renovation of conceptual tools to apprehend an
elusive, shifting reality”. He adds that;
It is often necessary to abandon the comfort of familiar definitions and theories
and formulating new and frequently imperfect ones…..which although untidy,
will take us closer to the understanding of events (Portes et al. 1989:4).
Grounded theory was used in the theoretical stages of this dissertation as is evident in
chapters one and two, particularly in developing Nairobi’s urban study model Fig.2.1.
Grounded theory also came in handy in analysing the material from the case study areas
and in deconstructing informality into “diverse informalities”.
The case study research allowed a more detailed explanation of the particularities in each
of the study areas. Case study is defined by Yin;
3
As an empirical enquiry that seeks to understand a contemporary phenomenon in
its real life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and
context are not evidently clear and in which multiple sources of evidence are
used.
Yin’s statement is complimented by Bell, 1993:8 who itemizes case studies as
explanatory, descriptive or exploratory. While researcher’s concern in an exploratory
case study is seeking new ideas or insights on the phenomenon being studied, a
descriptive case study deals with issues or events which have or are taking place.
Explanatory case studies, however seek to develop or unveil the cause-effect of the
studied phenomenon. In studying spatial transformations in Nairobi, the study will be
both explanatory and exploratory.
The main aim of this study is to enquire into how informal transformations are taking
place in Nairobi generally and in particular in formally designed settlements. The study
explores the factors influencing transformations and the implications of these
transformations on the built fabric of Nairobi. This work seeks to comprehend the
people’s attitudes to the mismatch between their needs and the provision of urban
services. It also seeks to document the type of mix-use developments that are resulting
from these informal urban transformations.
The informal/formal socio-spatial analogy will be the basic theoretical tool for analysing
the urban process in Nairobi. In addition, morphological transformations of Nairobi’s
urban tissue will be analysed using both synchronic and diachronic methods.1
Sources of Data
Grounded theory has the advantage of flexibility in data collection and the interaction
between concepts. It allows for the sources to range from historical records, to interviews
and observations. The method allowed the data collection for this research to be varied.
The sources ranged from theoretical literature on the phenomenon of informal
urbanisation and urban research on the city of Nairobi; to the analysis of maps, plans,
drawings, photographs, aerial photographs, digital images; census data; as well as indepth interviews with key informants.
1
See for example Samuels, I. et al. 2004; Castex, J. 1979; Moudon, A. V. 1997.
4
I sourced the time series aerial photographs from the Survey of Kenya, while the digital
images were sourced from the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for
Development (RCMRD). Land use maps and plot subdivisions were sourced at the Lands
Office-Ardhi House, and at the National Housing Corporation (NHC). Hard copy
archival drawings for Buru Buru were sourced at City Hall, and then digitised. Other
drawings were sourced from project consultants and some key informants. In addition I
shot all the photographs of the study areas included in this dissertation in the two year
period from 2003 to 2005.
Census data was sourced from the Republic of Kenya, Central Bureau of Statistics
publications on population and housing census. Finally an additional source was the
measured drawings and in-depth interviews carried out from 2003 to 2005 with different
players/actors in the various study areas including settlers, planners, authorities and
opinion leaders.
Choice of Case Studies
The initial idea was to select two or three study areas/settlements that depicted intensive
spatial transformations in the last 10 years or so. This was to be done by identifying the
relevant tools for carrying out the research such as availability of literature, graphical and
other visual material. A pilot study was carried out in the period February 2003 and July
2003, this study was supposed to identify the areas/settlements that were to comprise the
case studies. The pilot study showed that the phenomenon of informality in Nairobi was
complex, and therefore, carrying out a generalised study could not create a deeper
understanding of the phenomenon, this called for a new strategy. However, it became
also clear that many planned residential areas were being informalised, and that study
data for some of these areas could be pieced together.
I then spent the later part of the pilot study period on collecting data on Buru Buru estate,
a formally designed middle income estate that was undergoing rapid transformations. The
data was collected on two levels; the first level was in identifying the origins of the
settlement, who, why and how it developed, and its evolution over time. The second level
focused on the central issue of this thesis i.e. urban space. The inquiry into urban spatial
transformations included data at overall layouts and spatial features of the settlement,
5
infrastructural services and most importantly the transformations at lot level. The
lot/plot as the smallest identifiable unit in the settlement became my basic unit of
analysis. All along the guiding questions during the spatial analysis were; how is informal
urbanisation impacting on the urban fabric and services, which are the key players and
variables in this process. In addition at the lot level, the questions were; what kind of
architectural character is evolving and who are the main actors at this level of the urban
process.
Further literature review on the phenomenon of informality and exposure to grounded
theory, allowed me to restructure the study into for categories of informality: survivalist,
primary, intermediate and affluent. This was because the pilot study showed that
informality in Nairobi was not homogeneous but heterogeneous or diverse. This led to the
further development of the study into “diverse informalities”, as informal practices in
Nairobi are not a preserve of the urban poor but cut across all socio/economic classes,
and are therefore diverse.
Armed with the above knowledge/background, I was able to embark on the second
empirical study with a clear focus on which areas/settlements to interrogate. The Buru
Buru case was categorised as intermediate where the settlement was being modified. I
then had to identify the survivalist, primary and affluent categories including an
intermediate category where the settlement was being formed. Since the survivalist
category is mobile/transient, I could look at various examples to be found all over the
city. The kiosks at the entrance to Imara Daima estate and the adjacent Mukuru Kwa
Njenga informal settlement were selected as the cases for primary informalities. Jamhuri
2 estate, a new settlement formation was identified to form part of the intermediate
informalities case. Runda estate completed the choices as the case for affluent
informalities. The spatial analyses of these settlements/areas were made by using time
series aerial photographs while the detailed morphological unit transformations were also
documented.
In all the cases, the impact of the informalities on infrastructure and built fabric was
consistently analysed. Spatiality being at the core of this thesis, necessitated that spatial
transformations at the unit level were also observed in terms of; use of materials and
6
technology, and who were the actors in each situation. Grounded theory made it possible
to document, collect and compare data from these varied sources.
Methodological Problems
The main problem encountered was that, most settlements are not documented; I
therefore had to spend time making measured drawings, which were later digitised. The
other problem was that many people are not willing to be interviewed let alone give
permission for their premises to be photographed. This made me change the strategy of
field data collection, by focusing on using key informants and opinion leaders.
With regard to literature, some secondary sources present empirical evidence that is
sometimes contradictory. This made it necessary for me to look at different traits of the
same phenomenon, and thus organising the sifting process. The validity of responses
through interviews can also be problematic; however this was overcome by the strategy
of using key informants. The approach of using key informants helps to create the
necessary rapport, thereby eliminating the possibility of getting false responses.
Organisation of Monograph
The monograph is divided in six chapters. Chapter one which is the introduction deals
with; the problem of informality, objectives of the study, research questions, justification
of study, organisation of monograph and research methods. Chapter two tackles the
theoretical and conceptual framework of the study, where Nairobi’s urban study model is
developed. It highlights the theoretical debates on informality and argues for the place of
“diverse informalities”. Chapter three looks at the urban history of Nairobi and the
processes that led to the failure of planning and the emergence of informality. Chapter
four focuses on “diverse informalities”, starting with survivalist informalities through
primary, intermediate to affluent informalities. Chapter five covers the detailed study area
of the Mumias South Road corridor, and addresses the issue of informalising the formal.
Chapter six covers the conclusions with bibliography and appendices concluding the
write up.
7
2. THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Introduction
In this chapter, I explore the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that will anchor the
discourse on Nairobi’s urban process. In order to set the context for this, it is necessary to
briefly discuss the “Western Capitalist City Model”2, which historically has been the
basis for the design and development of Nairobi. Nairobi’s planning and development
proposals over the years, have been in the interests of the business and ruling elite, and
have tended to marginalise the urban majority.
This urban majority were predominantly the African labour force during the colonial
period. Although after independence, the European elite were replaced by the emerging
African bourgeois, the urban majority remained the African workers and new masses of
unemployed people. Subsequent post-colonial initiatives for the development of Nairobi
continued to marginalise this urban majority, who have had to seek alternative means of
survival.3
It is for the above reasons among others that the theories that have informed the
development of the “Western Capitalist City” are discussed. This Western Capitalist or
Market based city model, ignores most of the urban processes in cities of developing
countries. The theories informing the Western City are discussed at two levels; the first
level being the theories rooted in architecture, design and planning. The second level of
discussion focuses on urban social theory.
I then follow up with a discussion on colonial and traditional urban processes, which
leads to the discussion on informal urban processes. Re-conceptualising urbanity in
developing countries is then discussed, leading to the discussion on the evolution of
policies towards informal urbanisation. Re-conceptualising informality (The case for
“Diverse Informality”), is then considered before closing the chapter with a discussion
on informality and the centrality of space. What now follows is the discourse rooted in
Architecture, Design and Planning.
2
The 1927 Plan for the Settler Capital was based on South African Examples, while the 1948 Master Plan
for a Colonial Capital was comparable with the city plans of Paris, Canberra, Washington, Pretoria, Cape
Town and New Delhi – Thornton White, et al. 1948: 59.
3
The spatial transformations taking place in Nairobi are basically transformations of the colonial capitalist
city. These transformations are evolving a new spatial model in conditions of limited resources.
8
The Discourse Rooted in Architecture, Design and Planning
In discussing the urban process, I start with the discourse rooted in architecture, design
and planning. From a historical perspective, the debate rooted in architecture, design and
planning, gained its momentum during the industrial revolution, when the
medieval/classical city was supposed to be transformed, in order to satisfy the new
requirements of industrial society. The epidemics of 1830s and 1840s in Europe had the
effect of precipitating health reform and bringing about some of the earliest legislation
governing the construction and maintenance of dense conurbations. The Public Health
Act of 1848 in Britain, in addition to others, made local authorities legally responsible for
sewage, refuse collection, water supply, roads, the inspection of slaughter-houses and the
burial of the dead (UNCHS, 2003:74). Similar provisions were to occupy Haussmann
during the rebuilding of Paris between 1853 and 1870. According to Haussmann, the
basic problems of Paris were; polluted water supply, lack of adequate sewage system,
insufficient open space for both cemeteries and parks, large areas of squalid housing and
congested circulation. Haussmann’s radical solution to the physical aspect of Paris’
complex problems was “percement” (wholesale demolition in a straight line to create
entirely new streets). His broad purpose was, as Choay has written, “to give unity and
transform into an operative whole, the huge consumer market, and the immense
workshop of the Parisian agglomerate”.
Similarly, in Barcelona, the regional implications of urban regularisation were being
developed by the Spanish engineer Ildefonso Cerda` the inventor of the term
urbanizacion (Frampton, 1992). For Cerda`, transit was, in more ways than one the point
of departure for all scientifically-based urban structures. In 1867, Cerda` formulated a
general theory of urbanisation, which resulted in what he referred to as the Complete,
Integrated City. His main concern was the creation of healthy housing as a first
prerequisite for the creation of a new industrial city (Government of Catalonia, 2001). In
1882, Arturo Soria proposed the Linear City, believing that a linear city form was best
suited to optimising locomotion (Velez, D. 1982/83:131-164). Subsequently in 1889,
Camillo Sitte proposed the Cultural City, which was an attempt to recover a lost artistic
vision, and the highlighting of monuments by judicious use of squares and perspectives
(Sitte, C. 1889, Translated by Collins G. R. and Collins, C. C. 1965). The search for an
9
appropriate city model continued, and in 1898, Ebenezer Howard proposed the Garden
City (Hall, P. and Ward, C. 1998) as a blend of town and country, then Tony Garnier
followed in 1901 with the proposal for the Industrial City, which emerged to address the
growing need of making industry the motor of urban life (Wiebenson, D. 1969). Later on
in America, the 1935 proposals of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Broad Acre City had a lot
of influences from Howard’s earlier work (Wright, F. L. 1945). The foregoing not
withstanding, the urbanisation paradigm that has had a profound influence in the 20th
century was Le Corbusier’s 1943 proposal for a Rational City. This was a functional
solution with four main functions – habitation, work, rest, and movement, based on these
functions, zoning was established as an urban planning practice (Jenks, C. 1987).
In later years, rather than search for appropriate city models, many scholars/practitioners
were pre-occupied with urban analysis; for example, Rossi’s 1982 urbanisation discourse
in his publication; “the Architecture of the City”, is an attempt at formulating an
architectural language for analysing the city. He studies the city as spatial structure, as
derived from architecture and geography, as opposed to the city as urban space, which is
derived from an analysis of political, social and economic systems. The key question in
Rossi’s debate being, what composes a city? Scholars such as; Rob Krier, Leon Krier,
Rem Koolhaas and others have been pre-occupied with contemporary urbanity.
From the above discussion, it is evident that Social-spatial considerations were at the
core of the Western Capitalist urban process, as opposed to legal frameworks. I now turn
to the discourse rooted in urban social theory.
The Urban Social Theoretical Discourse
Early European Urban Theorists
Parallel to the debates rooted in architecture design and planning, there were other social
theoretical debates on the city. These debates yielded certain theories on the urban
condition under capitalism. The beginning of the urban social debates can be traced to the
work of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. These two theorists worked at a time when
Western society was changing from a feudal to a capitalist society, and the city was
becoming the centre of capitalist production and consumption.
10
The work of Karl Marx, particularly his later theoretical discussion of capitalism has
formed the basis for some of the most important contemporary discussions on the city.
For example the work of David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and Manuel Castells have been
shaped by the work of Marx. Especially Harvey and Lefebvre who have adopted Marxian
approaches as a corrective to what they see as the disruptive, and theoretical as well as
moral limits of other theories (especially neo-ecology) (Callinicos, A. 2004).
While Marx focused on capital, Engels was more concerned with the problems of the city
especially as they expressed the conditions of living for the labouring classes and as a
part of the issue of housing so central to many debates about the nature of reform and
society in the 19th century. For Engels, redesigning the city, reforming its mechanisms
and politics while necessary can only come about through a revolutionary change in
which capitalism is replaced by socialism. Engels (like Marx) saw the city as a critical
moment in the development and creation of capitalism. Thus for Engels, the very nature
of the city is not some accident or mistake open to reform, but the immirseration of its
masses represents at its core the very logic of capital (McLellan, D. (ed.), 1993).
Max Weber was another early theorist to theorise the condition of the city. Weber’s work
on social theory offered the most corrective and alternative to Marx and Engels among
modern social theorists. Weber, a key figure in the development of European sociology
and political theory, had much to say about the city. If Marx was the revolutionary
thinker looking for a theory of praxis and social transformation, Weber was the liberal
theorist looking at modern society from an entirely different set of lenses.
The basic tenet of Weber is that individuals act with free will and in their interaction with
others they seek to realise certain objectives or values. Sociology is about what people
achieve and the strategies which most likely yield the desired affects. At the heart of
Weber’s sociology, is the notion that sociology is the “interpretive understanding of
social action”. Weber rejects the notion that size and density defines the city. The city as
he defines it is done as a series of ideal types. A city for Weber is best understood in
terms of its political and economic role and organisation. Weber’s city typology was the
late medieval city state which is critical to Weber because his interest in the city is as an
institution that would free European society from what he saw as the shackles of
11
feudalism. Thus for Weber as for Marx, the discussion of the city is really part of a larger
discussion of capitalism (Martindale and Neuwirth, 1958).
On the other hand, Georg Simmel like many theorists of the late 19th century was
concerned with the shifting nature of social and cultural relations with the shift from a
more rural to a more urbanised society. Simmel emphasises the psycho-social split
between community and urbanity. Simmel sees the breakdown of the city as a result of
the growth of population and its effects on social relations – the dialectic shift of quantity
into quality. Like Marx, he sees the roots of this shift in the transformation of the
economy – most notably the importance of money as the key element of exchange in the
shift from communities to civets.
Simmel like Marx and Weber wrote at a time of great upheaval (19th/20th centuries). It
was a period of rapid advances in industrialisation, communications and transportation.
Cities were growing exponentially and society was shifting to one based on industrial
production, increasing ploritarianisation of the labour force and the demise of the rural
peasant agricultural and craft systems of work. These shifts transformed the way people
associated, located and defined themselves (Frisby, D. 1994).
The Chicago School
The Chicago School of Sociology attempted to sketch an organic theory of urban form, a
process which left us with an ideological and investigative field, which still influences the
ways we understand, imagine and plan our cities. The Chicago School also left a
collection of important case studies and ethnographic accounts of some of the richest and
poorest urban communities in Chicago and elsewhere. Although the work of the Chicago
School is a genuine shift in interest and approach, many of the images of their city and
their notions of what and why a city works the way it does resonates with the work of
Georg Simmel. Manuel Castells notes 50 years later, that the work of the Chicago School
is the first to ground and locate the city as place or territorial unit.
The Chicago School developed a general ecological theory of cities, where it was
believed that at the base of human society is a community, a natural, unplanned symbiotic
grouping based on proximity, kinship and common interactions. This ecological order is
made of independent individuals each with a place in a hierarchical pecking order in
12
which each member has a function. Competition helps create order as each part functions
for the whole because each community is in competition with all others (Tomasi, L.
1998).
Contemporary Theorists
David Harvey
Whereas the late 19th century and early 20th century theorists were concerned with the
conditions of the industrial city, the post 1960s theorists addressed the urban condition of
the high-tech globalising era. One such theorist among others is David Harvey. Harvey a
Marxist theorist is interested in understanding the forces that frame the urban process and
the urban experience under capitalism. In his book “Consciousness and the Urban
Experience”, he interrogates the city through the prism of money, time and space. The
rationality of money and the power of interest, the partitioning of time by the clock and
of space according to the cadastral register, are all abstractly conceived features of social
life. Yet each in its own way seems to have more power over us than we have over them
(Harvey, 1986:1).
Harvey argues that the demands to liberate space from its various forms of domination, to
liberate time for free use, and to exist independently of the crass vulgarity of pure money
valuations can each be built into social protest movements of enormous breadth and
scope. Yet creative use of money, space, and time also lies at the heart of constructive
urban experience (Harvey, 1986:2).
On the spatial dimension of capitalism, Harvey observes that:
The accumulation of capital has always been a profoundly geographical affair.
Without
the
possibilities
inherent
in
geographical
expansion,
spatial
reorganisation, and uneven geographical development, capitalism would long
have ceased to function as a political-economic system. The perpetual turn to a
“spatial fix” to capitalism’s internal contradictions coupled with the uneven
insertion of different territories and social formations into the capitalist market,
has created a global historical geography of capital accumulation whose character
needs to be well understood (Harvey, 2000:23).
13
The spatial fix was made possible by the invention of cadastral survey that enabled the
unambiguous definition of property rights in land.
Space thus came to be represented, like time and value, as abstract, objective,
homogeneous, and universal in its qualities. What the map makers and surveyors
did through mental representations, the merchants and land owners used for their
own class purposes (Harvey, 1986:13).
They were able to buy and sell space as a commodity. This act of buying and selling
space, made it possible to bring space under the single measuring rod of money value. In
addition, now that space could be demarcated and commoditised, builders, engineers and
architects for their part showed how abstract representations of objective space could be
combined with the exploration of concrete , malleable properties of materials in space
(Harvey, 1986:13).
Based on Marx’s and Engels’ somewhat ambivalent approach to capitalist space, Harvey
shows that rhetorical mode of geographical restructurings tend to privilege time and
history over space and geography (Harvey, 2000:24). However, Lefebvre makes a
counter argument in his debate on social space. He argues that;
Economic space sub-ordinates time, whereas political space eradicates it because
it is threatening to existing power relations. The primacy of the economic, and
still more the political, leads the supremacy of space over time (Lefebvre,
1979:147).
For Harvey, urbanisation concentrates productive forces as well as labour power in space,
transforming scattered populations and decentralised systems of property rights into
massive concentrations of political and economic power that eventually consolidated the
legal and military apparatus of the nation state.
Nature’s forces are subjected to human control as transport and communication
systems, territorial divisions of labour, and urban infrastructures are created as
foundations for capital accumulation (Harvey, 2000:25).
The consequences of concentrating the proletariat in factories and towns are that; they are
made aware of their common interests. On this basis they begin to build institutions, such
as unions, to articulate their claims.
14
Harvey has also argued that money can be converted into social power, and to some
degree, space and time are also forms of social power. Their control could all too easily
degenerate into a replication of forms of class domination that the elimination of money
power was supposed to abolish (Harvey, 1986:32). On this basis, the control of space and
time is the reason why car and homeownership make such an attractive combination as it
ensures an individualised ability to command time and protect space simultaneously
(Harvey, 1986:13; Castells, 1978:31).
Finally Harvey observes that;
Capitalism these last two hundred years has produced, through its dominant form
of urbanisation, not only a “second nature” of built environments even harder to
transform than the virgin nature of frontier regions years ago, but also an
urbanised human nature, endowed with a very specific sense of time, space, and
money as sources of social power and with sophisticated abilities and strategies to
win back from one corner of urban life what may be lost in another (Harvey,
1986:35).
Other Theorists
Many theorists have been debating the urban condition in the 20th century. I now
highlight a few of these theorists, by articulating the salient issues they raise in their
debates.
Manuel Castells addresses the urban phenomenon through the lenses of “social
movements”. Castells sees cities as a residential form adopted by those members of
society whose direct presence at the places of agricultural production was not necessary.
That is to say, these cities could exist only on the basis of the surplus produced by
working the land. They were religious, administrative and political centres, the spatial
expression of social complexity determined by the process of appropriation and
reinvestment of the product of labour (Susser, 2002:23). In discussing the city, Castells
uses the concept of collective consumption, and illustrates the resulting urban
contradictions in advanced capitalism.
Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist theorist on the other hand debates the production of “Social
Space”. He asserts that; the production of space, in concept and reality, has only recently
15
appeared, mainly, in the explosion of the historical city, the general urbanisation of
society, the problems of spatial organisation and so forth. Today, the analysis of
production shows that we have passed from the production of things in space to the
production of space itself (Lefebvre, 1979:141).
For Lefebvre, space has its own reality in the current mode of production and society,
with the same claims and in the same global process as merchandise, money and capital.
He posits that;
Capitalism and neo-capitalism have produced an abstract space that is the
reflection of the world of business on both national and international levels, as
well as the power of money and the “politique” of the state (Lefebvre, 1979: 143).
Lefebvre further argues that capitalist space can be used as; a means of production, an
object of consumption and as a political instrument. The dominance of the capitalist
space has led to class struggles, and the intervention in its production. This intervention
would lead to the production of socialist space, which means;
The end of private property and the states political domination of space, which
implies the passage from domination to appropriation and the primacy of use over
exchange (Lefebvre, 1979:149).
Edward Soja is another theorist, who discusses the city through the paradigm of postmodernity, where the urbanisation process is changing, but also maintaining continuity
with modernity. A condition he refers to as a shift from the Fordist to the postfordist
urbanisation (Soja, 1994). Soja asserts that space in the social sciences, has also returned
as a key analytical tool. He argues that in it is in space, and not necessarily history, where
some of the most insightful perspectives can be found.
The production of spatiality in conjunction with the making of history can thus be
described as the medium and the outcome, the presupposition and the
embodiment, of social action and relationship, of society itself. Social and spatial
structures are dialectically intertwined in social life, not just mapped one on to the
other as categorical projections (Soja, 1989:127).
Graham and Marvin discuss the post modern city in their book “Splintering Urbanisms”,
by focusing on the networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the emerging
urban condition. They construct a parallel and cross-cutting perspective of urban and
16
infrastructure change, and show that modern urbanism is an extraordinarily complex and
dynamic socio-technical process (Graham and Marvin, 2001).
The discussion by early European urban theorists on the urban condition of the Western
City, although generally abstract, and mainly focusing on capital, directly illustrates how
capital impacts on urban space. This in effect makes the discussion of capital congruent
with the discussion of urban space. In fact, as was shown, Harvey addresses the spatial
dimension of capital. Furthermore, most contemporary theorists discussing the urban
condition, mainly focus on the spatial dimension of urbanity.
The above debates are rooted in the urban condition of the Western Capitalist or Market
based city. As discussed earlier, these debates ignore much of the urban process in
developing countries. I now discuss the colonial and traditional debates that address to
some degree the urban process in developing countries.
The Discourse Rooted in Colonial and Traditional Urban Processes
From the very beginning, colonial urbanisation was based on authoritarian city planning
which emerged in Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1920s and 1930s, and exploded from the
1950s. It should be noted that “the concept of colonial cities as urban laboratories is
important in terms of urban theory, legislation, and actual policies” (Wright, 1987, quoted
in Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1991:68). Colonial cities were used as experimental fields, to try
and improve urban models born in Europe from European professionals combining
modernism in architecture with the idea of integrating cultural phenomena into social and
political history. These kinds of experiments at the time could not be attempted either in
England or France, but only in the colonies (Vidrovitch, 1991:68). The so-called
spontaneous settlements, did not originate in the post-colonial mushrooming cities of
today. They were from the beginning a structural part of colonial realities. The concepts
‘formal’ and ‘informal’ are useful as long as one recognises that informal practices are
both constituted by, and must be analysed in relation to, formal practices.
Several scholars have also addressed the phenomenon of informality in relation to
colonialism, for example Home, 1983 argues that quite often the physical separation of
colonial from traditional urban forms creates “twin cities” in symbiotic relationship.
Similarly House, 1984 argues that the formal and informal sectors are generally thought
17
to be symbiotic, with the vitality of the informal sector depending upon the wages and
demand generated by the formal sector. This dualism could be seen in the British colonial
administrative formula of indirect rule, through which parallel governmental structures
(“native” and “European”) co-existed (Myers, 2003:5). This system of governance further
reinforced the informal/formal dichotomy of spatial and social segregation.
The emergence of informalities can therefore be traced to the beginning of colonialism,
when dual systems of urban processes were institutionalised i.e. the “European” and the
“Native” (Myers, 2003; Mitchell, 1991). These dualities gave birth to one of the major
realities in third world cities today; the informal/formal divide. This can be attributed to
the Eurocentric view of order, propagated in the colonial period, where for there to be an
inside there must be an outside – the twin phenomenon. That is why early Europeans
experienced Egypt differently;
Flaubert experiences Cairo as a visual turmoil. At first it is indescribable, except
as disorder. What can he write about the place? That it is a chaos of colour and
detail, which refuses to compose itself as a picture (Mitchell, 1991:21).
This early pre-conception led to the segregated colonial city that encouraged the
phenomenon
of
informality
i.e.
formal/informal,
rich/poor,
European/African,
inside/outside etc (Mitchell, 1991).
Space as a phenomenon is intrinsically neutral, however, space acquires a given meaning
or category according to specific circumstances. Space can be informal, social, economic,
Euclidean, capitalist, colonial etc, or even urban depending on one’s concept of urbanity.
In general spatial categories are social constructs. In discussing informal urbanisation,
space plays a central role, since the focus of the discussion is on the production and
consumption of urban space, and whether it is formal or informal (Mitchell, 1991; Myers,
2003).
Informality as a residential and professional social category was invented as soon as
Western capitalism entered Africa. This happened during the early years of colonisation,
the period of establishing a European presence in Africa. It was also a period of creating
a political order that inscribed in the social world a new conception of space, new forms
of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real (Mitchell,
1991).
18
The early colonialists manipulated space, by applying the principles of enframing, in
order to exploit, legitimise colonial rule and dominate the colonised. These colonialists
were pre-occupied with an attempt to create order in all spheres of life in the new
colonies, and spatial order became a major pre-occupation. Where there was an existing
settlement, like in Egypt, the new spatial order became the formal while the old order
became the informal (Berman, 1990; Home, 1997). Similarly, in Uganda the British
established a formal municipality while the local Ganda capital (the Kibuga) remained
informal (Gutkind, 1960; Sanya, 2002), space was categorised according to who
controlled it. Lefebvre, 1976 posits that capitalism has survived in the 20th century by one
and only one means ‘by occupying space, by producing space’.
In manipulating space, the principle of spatial segregation played a major role in the
colonial logic. In colonial Zanzibar for example space was divided among the European
colonial elite, the Indian traders and the African urban majority. Spatial segregation was
carried out across the entire colonial Africa, culminating in the apartheid policies of Boer
South Africa. Major changes took place in many countries at independence; however, in
matters to do with urban planning, the post-colonial regimes chose continuity rather than
change. The colonial obsession with spatial order as an ideological tool and means of
civil control: - segmentation of the city, containerised notions of inside and outside plus
central spaces of observation and surveillance, persisted after independence (Myers,
2003). These spatial orders however, virtually ignored the every-day spatial life-world of
the urban majority. These urban majority, resort to re-framing these colonial frameworks
through their limited power (uwezo), local customary practices (desturi) and through faith
(imani). Very often the results of this spatial re-framing by the urban majority are
informal settlements.
The above colonial notions of urbanity in developing countries came to be regarded as
the traditional practices in the cities of these countries. This assumption led to the
institutionalisation of the formal/informal dichotomy, where formal processes were seen
as those with Western roots, while informal processes were those based on
local/indigenous practices. This divide of the formal/informal is at the core of this
thesis.
19
What now follows is the discourse rooted in the informal urban process. Evidence will be
adduced to show that the phenomenon of informality has had a major influence on the
production of cities of developing countries. This has generated a different city model
from the Western model.
The Discourse Rooted in the Informal Urban Process
Evolution of the Concept of Informality
Studies on the informal sector, started as an economic concept, and then were partially
transformed into social and spatial concepts, especially in francophone literature
(Coquery-Vodrovitch, 1991). Earlier on, in the 19th century, small towns in the African
savannah were the locus of urban social stratification with distinctions between the rich
and the poor.
The poor had no other way to survive but by dependency and slavery or perhaps
by individual techniques of independent survival possible in cities (Vidrovitch,
1991:59).
Pre-colonial African societies had pre-mercantile trade based on a barter system, where
most relationships between the trading parties were informal in nature (Amin, 1976).
Some of these practices persisted during the colonial period, as they were already
embedded in the pre-colonial social economy. Therefore the informal sector is not a new
reality, but as a residential and professional social category, it was produced as soon as
Western capitalism entered Africa. (Cooper, 1987; Vidrovitch, 1991).
The earliest references to the phenomenon of informal urbanisation appear in the work of
John F. C. Turner and Charles Abrams (Abrams 1964, 1966; Turner 1968). But the first
time the term informal is used with regard to urban policy is with the International
Labour Office (ILO) Employment Mission to Kenya in 1972. According to the ILO
definition the informal sector is constituted by those activities characterised by ease of
entry, reliance on indigenous resources, family ownership and resources, skills acquired
outside the formal education system, labour intensive, easily adapted technology,
unregulated and outside fully competitive markets (ILO, 1972).
In an attempt to solving the proliferation of informality in Third World Cities, Turner
advocated for the integration of squatters in formal urban structures. The Turner
20
paradigm which was based on autonomy and subsidiarity was instrumental in the
development of later day “site and services” projects. Turner would later disagree with
the direction that the understanding of his research was taking. His concern, “squatters
are part of the solution not the problem” and his fundamental point was that;
The intrinsic dis-economies and social dysfunctions of centrally administered
personal services lead to the inevitable failure of commercially or institutionally
centralised housing (Turner, 1976:257).
Turner further brought to light the issues of autonomy and heteronomy in building
environments, by asking fundamental questions with regard to urbanisation.
Whose participation, in whose decisions and whose actions? (Turner, 1976:139).
In development economics, it is only recently that the importance of cities for economic
development has been recognised. In fact, multilateral and bilateral agencies only slowly
formulated strategies for urban development, but unauthorised settlements were either
ignored or demolished, and informal income generation was considered to be a passing
phenomenon, linked to high rural-urban migration. However such policies that advocated
for the demolition of informal settlements/housing, did not increase the housing stock of
the cities in question. It is on this basis that Turner argued that informality is not the
problem, but part of the solution to the housing question.
Researchers during the 1970s and 80s tended to view the informal sector as a “bulk”.
Informality was applied indiscriminately to construction, economic, social and political
activities. Lisa Peattie has argued recently that the term “informal sector”, though very
helpful in many instances, had become a sort of “semantic blanket over a variety of
enterprises sharing the attributes of being off the map” (Peattie, 1996). It has reached its
limitations in offering convincing explanations and informing public policies. In addition,
most of the literature regarding informal urbanisation has focused on the issue of housing,
which seems natural if one takes into account the rhetorical and ideological value of
housing. Both in academic research and in policy making, housing has been the favourite
subject of choice. The work of Turner in Peru, extremely influential in academic writing,
planning, and among development agencies, became the paradigm for institutional
housing policies in most of the developing world.
21
Other authors dealing with informality use the term informal settlements to “emphasise
the economic connotations of the modality of housing in contrast with the formal market”
even though arguing that informality refers to settlements existing outside the
institutional systems and formal markets, rather than from being spontaneous (Alexander
1986:53 in Castillo, 2000:23). Schteingart, 1990:110 in Castillo, 2000 defined informal
housing as a form of housing production that does not meet legal guidelines with regard
to the mode of land appropriation and construction regulations being undertaken without
official government permission. In addition, builders in the informal sector lack financial
aid, and they use indigenous building techniques. For Portes, Castells and Benton the
central feature of the informal (economy) is the fact that its activities are unregulated by
the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in which similar activities are
regulated.
In addition to the above, initial expectations that the informal sector would soon be
absorbed into the formal have given way, at least through the decade of the 1990s, and
that informality seems to be spreading (Lubell et al. 1991). Scholars recognised that
informal development was no longer “an illegitimate child born out of the process of
rapid urbanisation”, (Ward, 1982:276), especially population increase and migration. The
debates for and against informal urbanisation are for the most part non-conclusive. For
Ward, as well as others (Burgess, 1982; Harms, 1982), the state was giving up its
responsibilities to society by favouring self-help and not developing stronger housing
policies.
In 1989, Castells and Portes argued that the informal economy was a structural feature of
all advanced economies, the boundaries of which were adjusted with political and
economic shifts. They defined the informal economy not as an activity per se, but as
income-generating activities that are not regulated in the context in which they are legally
required to be. Castells and Portes, 1989:12 characterised informality as having one
central feature of extra legality. Additionally, according to ILO usage, the informal sector
is composed of unenumerated self-employed, mainly providing a livelihood for new
entrants into the cities.
In recent times, the phenomenon of informality is being reconsidered, with a view of
taking advantage of some of its positive attributes. These attempts will try to overcome
22
the bureaucrats’ tendency of constructing a model of the social field in which they want
to intervene; this model is thus the basis for a formal understanding of a social field. This
formal understanding necessarily cuts away large chunks of the social field, highlighting
only those aspects that are open to enumeration and manipulation (Hansen and Vaa,
2004:46).
According to Nustad 2004, the term “informal” was coined as a term for acts and
processes that escaped certain economic models. Thus, ‘informality’ is not itself a
characteristic of an activity; it only signifies that it has been left out by a definition that is
‘formal’. But, as the history of this concept clearly demonstrates, in naming there lies a
peril: “the informal”, instead of denoting the flux of social practices, was instead
encompassed by formal models as a residual category for everything which escaped the
conceptual grid of administrators and academics. Nustad further posits that, despite this
fate, the informal/formal dichotomy can act as a useful tool for analysing attempts by
bureaucrats at ordering the world according to their models and people’s responses to
these attempts (Nustad in Hansen and Vaa, 2004: 45-61).
Nustad, 2004 further posits that:
Informality is in the eyes of the beholder. One of the original merits of Hart’s
work was to point out that “the informal” can not be equated with the irregular,
irrational, unpredictable, unstable and invisible. The informal denotes phenomena
and processes that escape certain definitions of reality (Nustad in Hansen and
Vaa, 2004:58).
The people, whose strategies and acts are denoted as informal, would of course believe
that they lived within social forms which help them to manage their lives, in other words
informality is a subjective social construct. Finally, it should be noted that although
colonialism perpetuated informal urbanisation, the informal economy is a near universal
phenomenon, present in countries and regions at very different levels of economic
development and not confined to a set of survival activities performed by destitute people
on the margins of society (Hansen and Vaa (Ed), 2004:11).
The phenomenon of informality is gradually becoming a central theme of the
urbanisation discourse, as exemplified by many publications, particularly those by
UNCHS on the urbanising/globalising world. This general debate and attitude towards
23
this phenomenon of informality and its relation to the urban process, by bureaucrats and
many scholars has been ambivalent. This ambivalence has led to other debates on
informality, which I now address.
Other Debates on Informality
The Urban Informal Sector (UIS) debate which was aspatial fundamentally, gained
prominence in the early 1970s, as evidenced by the large amount of literature on this
phenomenon. This debate has generally focused on the social/political economy of cities
or countries, where issues to do with governance, poverty, migration, human rights,
gender equity, urban management etc., have been addressed (Rakodi, 1997; Fernandes
and Varley, 1998; Simone, 2002). With regard to human settlements, the issues raised
have been to do with informal settlement upgrading, squatting, energy use and
environmental sustainability among others (UNCHS, 2003, 2001, 1996; Syagga, 2002).
Coquery-Vidrovitch posits that there is an ideological significance for labelling this
phenomenon as informal. It underlines the Western tendency to put out-of-bounds all
economic activities which could not be strictly labelled as those within the market or state
systems.
It is not by chance that the concept appeared at the very beginning of the 1970s,
at the moment when industrialisation and modernisation (read Westernisation)
were still offered as the unique hope for development (Coquery-Vidrovitch,
1991:60).
On the example of Mombasa, Cooper illustrates the anteriority of this recently
discovered informal sector, which long existed and was known to the British “as living
off one’s wits” (Cooper, 1987:181). So what is the significance of the present anteriority?
More recently, Castillo, 2000 posited that; the term informal when categorizing
urbanisation, has sometimes been used synonymously with other terms such as; irregular,
illegal, uncontrolled, unauthorized, unplanned, self-generated, marginal, shanty,
spontaneous or even self-help. Each of these terms while related, and most of the time
referring to the same phenomenon, seeks to emphasize one aspect of the subject of
research.
24
It is important to acknowledge that this urban condition cannot be understood
one-dimensionally, and that each term carries a bias, ideological, disciplinary etc
(Castillo, 2000:22).
The economic perspective in the informality debate gained prominence during the
modernists’ period, although from time immemorial economics has always played a
significant role in the urban process. Urbanisation is perhaps the only enduring trend in
human history. The high rate of urbanisation that is occurring throughout the developing
world parallels that which occurred in England and some other European countries during
their industrial revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries. What is different now is that
urbanisation is not being accompanied by adequate economic growth in many developing
countries; this scenario creates a situation of urbanisation of poverty (UNCHS, 2003:25).
In addition, cities are complex systems, and as societies urbanise, their economies
become increasingly differentiated. Their organisation increasingly revolves around
specialised activities in the production, consumption and trade of goods and services. The
appearance of informal settlements was not only due to population pressure from
immigrant proletariat that began thronging the capitals of Europe, but was also due to the
depersonalisation of people and commodification of space that occurred during the early
days of capitalism (Vidrovitch, 1991, Harvey, 1986, Lefebvre, 1979).4
In recent years much of the economic and political environment in which globalisation
has accelerated has been instituted under the guiding hand of a major paradigm: neoliberalism; which is associated with the retreat of the national state, liberalisation of trade,
markets and financial systems and privatisation of urban services (UNCHS, 2003:2). In
the face of shrinking formal urban employment opportunities, global, and national
policies as much as anything else, have led to the rapid expansion of the informal sector
in cities.
The Stretched capacity of most urban economies in developing countries is unable
to meet more than a fraction of the population’s needs, so that the informal sector
is providing most of the new employment and housing in environments that have
come to be known as informal settlements or slums, where more than half the
4
This commoditisation of space was to have a major impact on the urban process of Nairobi, as will be
shown in chapter 3, 4 and 5.
25
population in many cities and towns of the developing countries are currently
living and working (UNCHS, 2003:5)
Informal economic enterprises- those defined as small-scale, mostly family operated or
individual activities that are not legally registered and usually do not provide their
workers with social security or legal protection- absorb at least half the work force in
many large African cities. For sub-Sahara Africa, the informal economy engages 63% of
the total urban labour force (Rakodi, 1997). On the other hand, the accumulation of
capital and often ostentatious Western lifestyles of the national elites and bourgeoisies are
built on exploitation, very similar to what the colonialists did. The majority of the
residents within these third world cities are marginalised, and have very little stake in this
globalising materialistic culture.
Informal settlements and urban poverty are not just a manifestation of population
expansion and demographic change, or even of the vast impersonal forces of
globalisation. Informal settlements must be seen as the result of a failure of housing
policies, laws and delivery systems, as well as the failure of national and urban policies.
The urban poor are trapped in an informal and “illegal” world – in settlements that are not
reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid and where
public services are not provided (UNCHS, 2003:6), And as Chabal and Daloz would put
it, where there is a general instrumentalisation of disorder.
Before the 1980s post-modern paradigm shifts, theories of spatial distribution, residential
differentiation and ecological succession had been developed by urban researchers. These
as discussed earlier, by and large can be traced to the “Chicago School” of the 1920s and
1930s, which sought to explain market-driven cities, where land use is determined by
economic competition. These theories are less applicable to many of the cities of the
developing world that are still undergoing transitions from more traditional exchange and
land tenure regimes (UNCHS, 2003:17; Syagga, 2002).5 The 1980s neo-liberal theories
have also impacted negatively on many third world urban residents, their emphasis on
economics and market forces has not worked in situations of high levels of inequality as
market forces are generally not pro-poor. The growth in the global labour force has
5
These transitions are similar to the transitions that took place in Europe and North America on the advent
of the industrial/capitalist society.
26
imposed enormous strains on urban settings, especially on employment and housing, and
as the formal sector has failed to meet such demands, the informal sector has taken up the
slack, in other words informality has occurred by default.
From an economic perspective, ‘informality’ suggests a different way from the norm, one
which breaches formal conventions and is not acceptable in formal circles – one which is
inferior, irregular and, at least somewhat undesirable. Informality involves internal
organization with a relatively flexible and informal hierarchy of work and roles. It
displays little or no division between labour and capital as factors of production
(UNCHS, 2003:100).
Similarly, some Marxist oriented writers, have, argued that ‘informal’ was a bourgeois
term that covered up class relations. After initially embracing the concept, a number of
social scientists began arguing that the formal/informal dichotomy was not really helpful
at all: actual cases of informal economy activity proved to be closely tied to the formal
economy; and this undermined, it was argued the usefulness of maintaining the
dichotomy (Skar, 1985). Coquery-Vidrovitch also argues that informality is rooted in
history, and concepts such as tradition or the informal sector are dead-ends.
African cultural processes and African problems of employment are neither
traditional nor informal. In a way they are commonplace and must be studied as
both universal and specific phenomenon (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1991:74).
The foregoing debates have highlighted how the phenomenon of informality has been
addressed basically from a Eurocentric/Western perspective. In order to enrich the
understanding of this phenomenon, I attempt to address it through third world lenses.
What now follows is the third world perspective of urbanity in the context of informality.
Re-conceptualising Urbanity in Developing Countries
In order to discuss the present day binaries of the urban process in third world cities, a
myriad of terms have been invented e.g. self-help, illegal, informal, spontaneous,
unplanned, unauthorized etc. This categorisation in effect, continues to marginalise and
exclude from mainstream urbanity a large percentage of the processes producing third
world urbanisms today. (Rakodi, 1997; NISCC, 1997). These approaches however tend
to treat these urban processes as homogeneous, yet they are diverse and heterogeneous
27
and need not be treated as one category. The urban processes which have been lumped
together have in general applied to the urban poor, what however is currently taking place
in most Third World cities, are processes that cut across socio-economic classes; the
poor, the not-so-poor and the well to do.6
Very often these processes result from the interplay of both the formal and informal
processes with the resultant hybrid urbanisms being what I want to refer to as “Diverse
Urbanisms”. Space plays a central role in diverse urbanisms, as space is the object that is
manipulated through both formal and informal processes to create these urbanisms.
Empirical evidence has shown that these urbanisms are not homogeneous and there is a
need to sketch the actual account of these processes and develop a more sophisticated,
accurate, and politically/technically useful understanding of these processes. This may be
a tall order, but a general theory of “diverse urbanisms” which results from “diverse
informalities”, is what is required if we have to comprehend third world urbanity
It is not possible to develop an integrated city, if the majority of the population and
economic practices are continually excluded from official policies and processes.
Publications such as UNCHS’ “Challenge of Slums”; Fernandes and Varley’s “Illegal
Cities” among others miss the point. This is because they try to lump together all the
informal third world urbanisms into a specific category i.e. slums or illegal cities. I wish
to point out that names have their own biases, and at the same time acknowledge
that term like informal/diverse gives a positive face to these settlements while terms
like slums/ illegal actually condemn them. Moreover, these settlements have come
about due to poverty, exclusion, unaffordability, weak local authorities etc.; these are
some of the issues the relevant authorities never highlight/address. That is why
“Reconsidering Informality” by Hansen and Vaa, 2004 begins to question the validity of
these general categorisations. In order to generate sustainable urbanisms in many
third world cities, it will be necessary to bring the ‘urban majority’ on board and
discard the current elitist agenda.
From a historical perspective, older European cities grew in an environment where
market norms and feudal landholding systems had been well established in the Middle
Ages, and dwellings could be readily traded by owners or landlords for alternative uses
6
See Study Model Fig.2.1
28
(Friedman, 1988). The early industrial cities grew during a time when most work was
centrally located and people walked, then later expanded to suburbs along rail corridors,
filling between these corridors as personal motor transport became universally available
(UNCHS, 2003). However, the situation of cities that have emerged as substantial centres
in the developing world during the past 50 years is often very different from that of a
succession of land uses described by the Chicago School (UNCHS, 2003:17). In any
case, did these third world cities industrialise? The Chicago School theories might
have been applicable in the first half of the 20th century in the West; it is unlikely that
they can work today in Third World situations.
Planning within a political system of monopolistic power serves to reinforce hegemony
rather than operate as regulatory framework; this makes the issue of informality rather
problematic, since informality as an issue to be addressed by planning is a fairly recent
phenomenon, as it started being addressed at the beginning of the 1970s, as discussed
earlier. Regularisation and security of tenure dominated the policy agenda of the late
1970s and 1980s; regularisation however, is just a minor step in incorporating informal
settlements to the city (Castillo, 2000). Most research has shown that; regularisation is
closely tied to political patronage, consensus building and party favours. Many
settlements can exist for years without getting services, if residents are unable to organise
and use political pressure to satisfy basic services such as water, sewage and electricity.
From the 1990s to date, the neo-liberal policy of enablement and liberalisation has been
the dominant policy in most developing countries.7
In trying to understand “third world urbanity” we need to refocus on practices (social,
economic, architectural and urban), and the forms (physical, spatial) that a group of
actors/ stakeholders (dwellers, developers, planners, land owners and the state), undertake
not only to obtain access to land and housing, but to also satisfy their needs to engage in
urban life (Castillo, 2000:29). To call third world urbanity “diverse urbanisms” as
opposed to informal urbanisation is to discard the stigma of informality, in addition
to acknowledging that this process involves much more than the construction of
dwellings. It involves the production of public and private space, and creating strategies
7
Policies towards informal urbanisation are addressed later in this chapter.
29
for satisfying all the other urban necessities such as health, education, transportation and
access to jobs (Rakodi, 1997; Simone, 2002).
Very often politicians determine the fate of most informal settlements. They may declare
some settlements as upgrading areas, and therefore officially recognised as part of the
formal urban fabric, which is tantamount to urbanisation by decree. On the other hand the
regularisation process appears to be a conciliatory gesture rather than an application of
the law. From the government’s initial tolerance of illegal subdivisions and sales, to the
painless regularisation process, the authorities recognise that informal developers fill in a
social void.
Not only is urban law negotiated among stake holders, but even worse, urbanity is
granted by “decree”. This is probably one of the most unfortunate costs of
informal urbanisation for settlers and society. Residents are forced to invest more
in political actions and lobbying than in productive activities that would improve
their economic and social conditions (Castillo, 2000:38).
I use the term “Diverse Informalities”, in discussing the urban process in developing
countries. These informalities generate diverse urbanisms, and represent a new model of
urbanity both in the processes and in the forms, as Castillo posits in urbanisms of the
informal;
The new model questions the two dominant approaches to city planning; those
guided by civic, visual or iconographic order and those where planning is a result
of rational quantitative decisions (Castillo, 2000:141).
Diverse informalities will emphasise the spatial dimension of informality, as opposed
to the models guided by legal, economic, social or anthropological distinctions. Most
concepts used to describe informality such as illegal, irregular, self-help etc., are socially
constructed (and can, and tend to disappear over time), space, as a condition of diverse
informalities, remains over time. It is precisely because of this permanence that a
spatial framework of the phenomenon of informality can be more accurate and
instrumental. Diverse informalities will place the issue of architecture and urban design at
the centre of the discussion of informal urban processes.
The spatial dimension has often been ignored in the discussion of informality. Simone,
2002 in re-thinking urban sustainability in a time of uncertainty, explores how
30
informality can function sustainably in an urban context. Simone observes that; informal
urban practices are characterised by tactical and incremental decisions, by a complex
interaction among players, and a distinct set of spatial strategies that produce a
progressive urban space and a reconfiguration of its hierarchies. This observation is
further illustrated in chapter four Fig.4.7, where space is configured and evolves from a
survivalist category to a kiosk-a primary category of informality.
Suspending judgement on the quality of the urban environment resulting from informal
processes, should produce a better understanding and possibilities of creating better
policies for more effective programmes. This does not mean accepting the fiction that
because it exists, informal urbanisation is optimal. On the contrary, to recognise and
describe the processes and the sort of space produced through this phenomenon is a first
stage in reducing its enormous social, developmental and environmental costs. To call the
phenomenon “diverse informalities” as opposed to informal housing is to emphasise that
the production of urban space by the settlers, developers and the state, is a totality beyond
the construction of private buildings. It involves the production of the public space, and
the strategies for satisfying all their urban necessities such as health, education,
transportation and access to jobs (Castillo, 2000:30).
Some of these strategies are also highlighted by Castells, 1983:212 who posits that when
squatters refuse to live in high-rise buildings, it is not only because of their essential
traditionalism- they need to raise poultry and cultivate vegetables as a basic element of
their subsistence, therefore they cannot afford the luxury of living above ground.
In the current era of globalisation, the forces of globalisation have in general impacted
negatively on most Third World Cities, the implementation of structural adjustment
programmes created the loss of public sector jobs, without creating private sector jobs. At
the same time, economic and cultural differences between city and rural areas have
become increasingly blurred, because of this trend which has recently led to a
proliferation of urban agriculture as a survivalist strategy. The privatisation process has
favoured multinational corporations which have increasingly marginalised local
enterprises. Local products have been unable to compete for opportunities generated by
global markets.
31
All these factors have caused a further deterioration of the living standards in Third
World Cities including the built environment. Globalisation has not created a
homogeneous global society, but has benefited the ruling classes and a few business
elites of the Third World (Rakodi, 1997). Africa in particular, has been integrated into
the world trade system on unfavourable terms and has become dependent on international
assistance.
Although Coke, McDonald’s and even Toyotas in varying states of decrepitude
are now common commodities from Greenland to Mt. Kilimanjaro, and are
having an impact on lifestyles, we can not assume that this is necessarily evidence
of social and cultural convergence in a unidirectional linear sense with
predetermined or universally predictable outcome (Rakodi, 1997:76).
On the other hand De Soto, 2001:219 argues that;
Capitalisation is in crisis outside the West not because international globalisation
is failing, but because developing and ex-communist nations have been unable to
“globalise” capital within their own countries.
Similarly, Simone, 2002, wonders whether mobilising informal networks and processes
within African cities can serve as a platform for more proficient engagements of global
urbanisation processes and for building a more equitable and sustainable city.
Globalisation and current communication technology is here to stay; the onus is on Third
World cities to exploit their abundant human resources available in these cities. Because
of these dynamics;
Increasing numbers of Africans are situated in what could be called “half-built”
environments- i.e. under-developed, over-used, and fragmented and often makeshift urban infrastructures- but whose inefficiencies themselves induce the
cultivation of new health and social problems and the “urbanisation” of existing
ones (Simone, 2003:21)
The concept of informality has been used to legitimise certain legal and governance
practices in many African countries; however, in general, informality and legality have
not enjoyed a cordial relationship. Very often informal practices seen from a legal
perspective have been branded “illegal”. During the colonial and the immediate postcolonial eras, the management of towns and cities followed what have been described as
32
the “Anglophone” and “Francophone” models of government. The image of towns as
places of “European settlement” prevailed and the patterns and processes of governance
reflected this (Rakodi (ed), 1997:541).
Cities in developing countries are facing different challenges from those in the West.
Developing and ex-communist countries are facing (albeit in much more dramatic
proportions) the similar challenges the advanced nations dealt with between the 18th
century and the Second World War. Many cities are faced with massive informality and
are unable to formally provide urban goods and services. In fact;
Massive extra legality is not a new phenomenon. It is always what happens when
governments fail to make the law coincide with the way people live and work (De
Soto, 2001:96).
In Paris for example, the legal battle between tailors and second-hand clothes dealers
(informal traders) went on for more than three hundred years, it was stopped only by the
French Revolution. De Soto, 2001 who examines informal urbanisation through the prism
of capital, argues that nearly every developing and former communist nation has a formal
property system; the problem is that most citizens cannot gain access to it. Their only
alternative is to retreat with their assets into the extralegal (informal) sector where they
can live and do business – but without ever being able to convert their assets into capital.
To a large extent, they apply practices which were embedded in their pre-capitalist social
economies (Amin, 1976; Ayittey, 1991).
In most Western European countries, law began adapting to the needs of common people,
including their expectations about property rights, during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In fact the past of Europe strongly resembles the present of developing and former
communist countries. The history of the adoption of occupancy laws in the United States
of America is the history of the rise of extralegals as a political force. The pre-emptive
concept helped the American legal system to accommodate the informal (extralegal) land
practices during the 1830s, through the adoption of the Pre-emption Act of 1830.
It can rightly be said that extralegal groups played an important role in defining
property rights in the United States and added value to the land. American
property changed from being a means of preserving an old economic order to
become, instead, a powerful tool for creating a new one (De Soto, 2001:158)
33
There has been a general assumption that informality is cheap, contrary to this popular
wisdom, operating in the underground is hardly cost-free. Extralegal businesses are taxed
by the lack of good property law and continually having to hide operations from the
authorities. Extralegal social contracts rely on a combination of customs and ad hoc
improvisations of rules selectively borrowed from the official legal system. The
American legal system obtained its energy because it built on the experience of
grassroots Americans and the extralegal arrangements they created, while rejecting those
English common law doctrines that had little relevance to problems unique to the United
States (De Soto, 2001). African and ex-communist countries can borrow a leaf from the
above American experience in main streaming their extralegal sectors.
The reason why extralegal arrangements in many third world countries have become
widespread in the last forty years is because formal law has not been able to
accommodate rapidly evolving extralegal agreements. Quite often, legal reforms are
bureaucratic and slow, and if they do happen, they will normally have been overtaken by
events.
In real estate for example, extralegal social contracts originate not only from
outright squatting, but also from deficient housing and urban or agrarian reform
programmes, and the illegal purchase or lease of land for dwelling and industrial
purposes (De Soto, 2001:187).
In many urban areas, extralegal buildings and businesses evolve over time until they are
barely distinguishable from property that is perfectly legal. If cities in the developing
world have to attain some measure of integrated development, they need to accommodate
informal processes in the formal. De Soto posits that:
By bringing the extralegal sector inside the official law, it is possible to open up
the opportunity for massive housing programmes that will provide the poor with
homes that are not only better built but much cheaper than what they themselves
have been building in the extralegal sector (De Soto, 2001:205).
Where as I may agree to some extent with the above view, it may apply, mostly to
middle income earners, I doubt that it will apply to the very low income groups.
These very low income groups will still require massive subsidies from the state, if they
have to operate within mainstream law.
34
Creating a property system that is accessible to all is primarily a political job, because it
has to be kept on track by people who understand that the final goal of a property system
is not drafting elegant statutes, “connecting shiny computers or printing multicoloured
maps, but putting capital in the hands of the whole nation” (De Soto, 2001:218).
Evidence in Nairobi for example shows that there is no political will to change the status
quo in matters to do with property and land reforms.
The unprocedural allocation of land and the lack of checks and balances in the
system, benefits government officials, the same officials who are supposed to
institute meaningful property reforms (Syagga, 2002:79)
Extralegal arrangements are the dominant mode of carrying out business in the absence
of affordable legal means. These arrangements however have a;
disadvantage in that they are not integrated into the formal property system and as
a result are not fungible and adaptable to most transactions; they are not
connected into financial and investment circuits; and their members are not
accountable to authorities outside their own social contract (De Soto, 2001:90).
It should however be acknowledged that extra legality is rarely anti social in intent. The
“crimes” extralegals commit are designed to achieve such ordinary goals as building a
house, providing a service or developing a business.
Chabal and Daloz, 1999 address the phenomenon of informality in developing countries
by exploring three fundamental issues: - The informalisation of politics, the retraditionalisation of society and the production of economic failure. They argue that
during the colonial period for example, justice was more frequently rendered by the
colonial administrator than by a magistrate sitting in a court of law.
As a result, the ideal type of the (Weberian) bureaucratic state essentially
remained a myth of the colonial mission and there was never much chance that it
would survive at independence (Chabal and Daloz, 1999:12).
The post-colonial period in many African countries has been characterised by informality
at all levels of political organization, where informalisation is a condition for the
reproduction of political power. It is the means for mediating pressures exerted from
external institutions and forces and those coming from inside societies (Simone, 2002). In
this regard, it is essential to understand that the foundations of political accountability in
35
Africa are both collective and extra-institutional (informal): They rest on the
particularistic links between Big Men, or patrons, and their constituent communities.
The African informal political order is a system grounded in a reciprocal type of
interdependence between leaders, courtiers and the populace. And is a system that
works, however imperfectly, to maintain social bonds between those at the top
and bottom of society (Chabal and Daloz, 1999:44).
What happened in the post-colonial period was the Africanisation of politics, that is, the
adjustment of imported political models to the historical, sociological and cultural
realities of Africa. This is still going on today: the so-called democratic transitions are
being reinterpreted locally.
In Africa, it is expected that politics will lead to personal enrichment just as it is
expected that wealth will have direct influence on political matters. Rich men are
powerful. Powerful men are rich. Wealth and power are inextricably linked
(Chabal and Daloz, 1999:52).
These collective and informal accountability systems and the Africanisation of policies,
have a major impact on the urban process. Land transactions, tender procedures and
award of contracts plus many other national business transactions are carried out
informally and shrouded in secrecy. This leads to the inability of the formal development
control mechanisms of having any meaningful impact on the urban process.
The overlap between the formal and the informal as well as intense rivalry between
patrons creates an ideal framework for the spread of criminal activities. Informalisation is
nothing other than the day-to-day instrumentisation of what is a shifting and ill-defined
political realm. The informal political system functions in the here and now, not for the
sake of a hypothetical tomorrow. It can only work if it meets its obligations continuously.
In other words its legitimacy rests with its immediate achievements, not with its longterm ambitions. It does not allow for delayed reward or achievement-much less for long
term investment. That is partly why, although many African countries have been
independent for more than 40years, very few have attained any meaningful economic
growth, as the short-term approach to issues based on the need for immediate results, has
compromised long term strategies for problem solving.
36
The informal political order in Africa can only change when ordinary African
men and women have cause to reject the logic of personalised politics, seriously
question the legitimacy of the present political instrumentation of disorder and
struggle for new forms of political accountability (Chabal and Daloz, 1999:162).
Evidence in Nairobi shows that; the government rarely addresses the issue of informality.
Quite often, government resources are used for the development of middle and high
income housing in which government operatives have direct interest.
Governance and management are much more problematic in urban areas, as Rakodi, 1997
posits; urban management systems in most African cities are generally unable to keep
pace with infrastructure needs and, in some cases have all but collapsed. This has created
fertile ground for the informal procurement of these services, or improvisation of the
same. 8
As discussed earlier, informality is not homogeneous, as there are various layers of
informalisation ranging from enterprises that simply operate without licences, pay no tax,
or occupy a particular site without permission to major corruption and crime. Simone,
2002 also identified “the informal dimension” as the peculiar characteristic of African
urban reality, it is this dimension that, new forms of social interaction are developing and
consolidating. He further argues that these new forms demand to be interpreted with
innovative conceptual tools in order to be able to re-think the models of urban
development and the institutional typologies necessary to ensure a sustainable future to
African cities. It is estimated that roughly 75% of basic needs are provided informally in
the majority of African cities, and that processes of informalisation are expanding across
discrete sectors and domains of urban life (Simone, 2002).
Mabogunje, 1994 observed that; despite concerted efforts at municipal restructuring in
Nigeria, and institution-building that have taken place over the last decade or so, many
processes of city politics and administration have become increasingly informalised.
Many formal institutions now exist simply as a context in which a wide range of informal
business activity can be pursued. Thus institutions loose the capacity they might have had
to facilitate a shared public interest. Simone, 2002 asks;
8
See the Matatu mode of public transport discussed in chapter 3.
37
Can mobilizing informal networks and processes within African cities serve as a
platform for more proficient engagements of global urbanization processes and
for building a more equitable sustainable city?(Simone, 2002).
It should also be noted that, informalisation thrives particularly in weak states, where the
privatisation of violence as a way to secure new political alliances means that the regime
claiming state power has less need to secure uniform control over the territory of the
state.9 The control of key resources, usually highly sectorised and geographically specific
(like diamonds, gold etc), becomes more important than uniform administrative control.
Thus, the conventional bureaucratic instruments of control, i.e., armies, public policies,
regulatory systems, social welfare, are less reliable as instruments of regime control. This
is especially the case in conditions where debt conditionality is enormous, nationallybased patronage networks are fractured and the public sector has been drastically reduced
(Simone, 2002).
In their 1998, publication “Illegal Cities” Fernandes and Varley explore the role of law,
and illegality in the process of urban change in developing countries. They argue that the
land use patterns, the relationship between legal and illegal favours the rich, the legal and
institutional frameworks of these countries are often elitist and exclusionary. They further
assert that the main urban challenge is indeed the development of legitimacy in urban
governance (Fernandes and Varley, 1998). In some cities illegal settlements provide
accommodation for over half the urban population. In this respect one is led to question
the status of such settlements.
The illegal city should be accommodated within the legal city if reality on the
ground is to be reflected in law, because the credibility of the law will be
seriously undermined if the majority of the citizens or residents are classed as
illegal (Mitullah and Kibwana in Fernandes and Varley, 1998:191).
Mitullah and Kibwana further posit that illegality and legality can be conceptualised
purely on professional lines: the cities which the poor build and in which they live and
work are different from and unrelated to what the city authorities want built. Similarly,
too many countries still approach issues of land management in terms of rigid notions of
9
This is a condition akin to the current state of affairs in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
38
legality and illegality, McAuslan, 1994:582, argues that concepts of legality and illegality
obfuscate rather than illuminate.
Addressing some governance issues in Maseru, Leduka, 2004 argues that many
people/groups in Maseru-Lesotho, are unable to legally access land for housing, resorting
to non-compliance of the legal requirements. Non-compliance is a survival strategy, as
well as a strategy to gain access to resources that would otherwise remain outside the
reach of disadvantaged groups/individuals.
Moreover, given their lack of input or voice in the formulation of policy, action
by these groups is most effective if directed at policy implementation, where noncompliance becomes their only instrument of defeating or mitigating the negative
effects of state policies (Leduka, in Hansen and Vaa, 2004:178).
Leduka further argues that the disadvantaged individuals have no monopoly of the
“weapons of the weak” as these are available for use by any group of individuals to resist
state policies that might appear to threaten their interests.
The illegal city, therefore, could be considered as an outcome of societal noncompliance and illustrates how the “weapons of the weak” might have enabled
popular access to urban housing land by a majority of urban residents, irrespective
of their socio-economic status (Leduka in Hansen and Vaa, 2004:178).
Informal activities and practices may be illegal or extralegal but are not necessarily
perceived as illegitimate by the actors concerned. It is likely that many urban residents
consider what from the official standpoint is illegal or irregular as not only
functioning but normal and legitimate practices. Most African countries inherited and
have kept a legal framework for urban development that was designed to contain
settlement rather than to deal with rapid growth. Even if blatantly repressive aspects such
as pass laws were abolished at independence, zoning laws, building standards, and many
other planning regulations have remained on the books in several countries.
These regulations restrict the provision of housing affordable to the poor and the
not-so-poor; the result is the emergence of unauthorized or illegal settlements
(Hansen and Vaa, 2004:9).
In recent years, state power is being de-institutionalised and decentralised under internal
demands for democratisation and external pressure for economic liberalisation. Taken
39
together, factors such as central governments’ lack of resources, misappropriation and
patronage are pushing a variety of initiatives on to civic associations and NGOs, fuelling
the informalisation of services that the state is unable to provide. Jenkins in Hansen and
Vaa (Ed), 2004 posits that the concept of formality is particularly problematic, because of
its basis in legal and regulatory systems whose legitimacy for the majority of the urban
population may be doubtful. The formal/informal dichotomy is too simplistic to capture
the social, economic and political complexities of urban situations. In fact the urban
processes taking place in most post-colonial cities are quite diverse, generating “Diverse
Urbanisms”, which encompass both formal and informal practices.
Evidence from Maputo shows that an alternative approach to the traditional
formal/informal approach is possible, this approach is based on the concept of different
forms of socio-economic exchange, reciprocity, redistribution and the market (Jenkins, in
Hansen and Vaa, 2004). In other words the emphasis on legality and economics as the
main variables in urban processes should be balanced with the social, cultural and
political variables. It should also be appreciated that the inherited colonial legal system
which was incomplete and contradictory has led to even more complexity in the
definition of legality. In many countries the post-independence political and economic
elite favoured the retention of existing complex legal systems which, while cumbersome,
could be worked to their advantage due to their greater access to resources and power.
The nature of state capacity also underpins this: the state is politically weak and its legal
system has low administrative and technical capacity. This leads to bureaucratic groups
also manipulating regulatory regimes to their comparative advantage. In addition to
questioning the legitimacy of legal structures which effectively marginalise the majority,
there is a growing literature on governance, state legitimacy and the relationship between
state and civil society, which queries the legitimacy of regimes and social groups who
draw benefits from the state (Hansen and Vaa, 2004).
Very often the legal status of settlements and structures in matters to do with urban
development is over emphasised. However, legality is not particularly valuable to the
poor, many of the outcomes of legality are desirable, but can be achieved in different
ways (Payne, 2002 in UNCHS, 2003). In fact, there are differences between legitimacy
40
and legality, and a number of tenure arrangements stop well short of formal titling while
providing the desired benefits.
Secure de facto tenure is what matters to the inhabitants first and foremost – with
or without documents. It is the security from eviction that gives the house its main
source of value (Angel, 2001 in UNCHS, 2003).
Castillo argues that the division between formal and informal as seen through legal eyes
is flawed on two counts: First; it assumes that implementation of the law is constant and
effective. The weakness of the law affects the process of urbanisation at all stages of it.
Second; assuming, incorrectly, that informal urbanisation disregards the law, and
operates in spite of it, not because of it. Informal urbanisation does not regard legal
norms as irrelevant; on the contrary, the law is a real and substantive factor in the
formation and consolidation of informal settlements, in other words extralegality operates
because of legality.
Fortunately, recent legal research has focused on the idea that property law does not
embrace a single conception of property rights, that there are distinct ‘levels of illegality’,
and that the state has ceased to be the sole judge and regulator of the legal and the
legitimate (Castillo, 2000). This view brings into focus the ‘diverse’ or “hybrid”
urbanisation processes taking place in most Third World cities. Legality and for that
matter illegality are socially constructed terms, making it difficult to have a clear-cut
application of legality and illegality. Castillo identifies four misconceptions of informal
urbanisation, which have to be addressed critically in the understanding of these urban
processes. The four are: Informal urbanisation is unplanned urbanism; informal
urbanisation is only self-built housing; informal urbanisation will ultimately disappear
and informal urbanisation is not a legitimate form of urbanity. Empirical evidence shows
that these misconceptions have been proven wrong as most informal processes are
generally planned, seen from the perspective of the developer or activity manager.
Informal urbanisation involves more than self-help building and has not been able to
disappear but has grown over time.
The legitimacy of informal urbanity is contestable since legitimacy is socially
constructed and will vary from time to time, depending on circumstances, in any case as
was shown earlier the legitimacy of formal urbanity is also contestable. However if order
41
has to be maintained, some laws must remain inviolate so that there is a certain level of
continuity over long periods of time.
The above discussion on the condition of cities in developing countries shows that the
current ruling classes have been unable to maintain the model of city left behind by the
colonial powers. The colonial system of ignoring the presence of local/indigenous people
in urban areas is no longer tenable and cannot be enforced. This has exacerbated the
proliferation of informal urban processes to the extent that many processes that were
originally formal now operate informally. It is this state of affairs that requires the reconceptualisation of urbanity in developing countries, with a view to generating a viable
city model.
What now follows is the discussion on the evolution of policies towards informal
urbanisation.
The Evolution of Policies towards Informal Urbanisation
Settlement Demolition Policies
The policies towards informal urbanisation have coincided with the stages of
conceptualisation of the phenomenon. Prior to the 1960s and the findings of Mangin,
Turner and Abrams, informal settlements were perceived as a threat to political stability.
The terms used to refer to this kind of development, such as “urban cancer” demonstrated
the conventional wisdom regarding the marginal or semi-integrated forms of
urbanisation. These attitudes, Gilbert and Ward demonstrated had no empirical evidence
(Gilbert and Ward, 1985) and later studies demonstrate that overall the social and
political attitudes of the settlers were fairly conservative (Cornelius, 1975; Castillo,
2000).
In Mexico City for example, even with the lack of “formal planning” ad-hoc responses by
the state were utilised from the 1940s to the 1960s to deal with unforeseen growth and
occupation of land. These responses sometimes included relocation, granting “official”
land tenure, resolving disputes among owners and settlers or servicing occupied areas. In
some cases, political commitments required the eviction of squatters and the eradication
of slums (Castillo, 2000). These kind of interventions are quite similar to those carried
out in Nairobi from the 1960s through the 1980s, it is however evident that Nairobi City
42
Council and the country as a whole, lacks clear and specific policies for housing, land use
planning and land management (Syagga, 2002).
The official state policy during these years was a balance between co-optation and
confrontation.
The optimistic policies of the 1960s and early 1970s that aimed to minimise slums
through the construction of public housing, shifted to more realistic policies
where informality was assumed as a given, an on-going, permanent process, at
least in the short and medium term (Schteingart et al. 1994 quoted in Castillo
2000:26).
The spatial strategies adopted in the 1960s propagated a strong regulatory intervention
(based on Western minimum standards and solutions), was necessary in order to control,
direct and rationalise urban growth. This was very much in line with the Rational City
concepts propagated by Le Corbusier in the 1940s, where the principal planning tool used
for urban development, was the Master Plan. During the late 1960s and early 1970s a
major debate arose regarding Third World Cities, with the main issue being; how to guide
the rapid urbanisation process which was taking place in these cities and the question of
who makes decisions and at what level?
In this regard, it can be seen that; autonomy and heteronomy play a major role in the
urbanisation process, however since urbanity is materialised by the construction of a
“physical thing”-the city, these concepts for purposes of space production, have to
operate in tandem with the notion of private and public urban space. Decisions made at
domestic level can be seen as being autonomous, and generally control the production of
private urban space. While decisions made beyond the domestic realm can be considered
heteronymous, and control the production of public urban space.
Turner, 1976 has discussed these concepts at length and notes that “the partially
unresolved problem is to identify the practical and necessary limits of heteronomy and
it’s opposite, autonomy” (Turner, 1976:17). These limits are crucial in the urban process,
because in the creation of a city, different decisions are to be made at different levels, and
therefore by implication the decision makers are also crucial. Bureaucratic heteronymous
systems produce, products of high standards, at great cost, and of dubious value, while
autonomous systems produce products of extremely varied standards, but at low cost and
43
of high-use-value. It is these varied standards that led many governments to adopt
policies of demolition, with a view of producing products/settlements of uniform
standards. However uniformity quite often creates monotony of urban environments,
which can be oppressive and could do with variety.
Appreciating the various levels of decision making, can enable governments create
appropriate policies that can guide integrated urban development. The demolition policies
of the 1960s and 70s did not take cognisance of decision making at grassroots levels.
Regularisation Policies
In a very general way, informal urbanisation can be considered to be the forms of urban
development that take place outside the legal, planned and regulated channels of city
making. “Irregularity enters our consciousness the moment that the state decides to
normalise practices once considered marginal or irregular”. Ward defines irregular
settlements as;
Those which develop outside the law through invasion, through illegal
subdivision of land without proper permission and adequate service provision,
through illegal sale or cession of land to which the vendors have no alienable
rights. They are usually, but not exclusively, low-income areas and are commonly
referred to by a wide variety of local generic names in different countries (Ward
1983:35, quoted in Castillo, 2000:23).
It is for the above reasons that policies towards regularisation were initiated. In the 1970s
the new policies that emerged out of consensus and consolidated at the Habitat 1
conference in 1976 included: site and services and self-help housing projects; core
housing; slum and squatter settlement upgrading; tenure regularisation programmes; the
stimulation of small-scale enterprises and informal sector activities in project areas; and
an attempt to expand the provision of public services (Burgess, et al. 1997).
During this period, most developing countries were implementing a diverse set of actions
dealing with informality. On the one hand, the planners were pushing for a stronger social
housing policy with finished and progressive housing programmes; while on the other
hand, they accepted informality as a legitimate solution to the problem of housing the
urban poor. At the same time, many countries, Kenya included, through the influence of
44
the World Bank and other development organisations, instituted programmes such as
sites and services. Nairobi’s Dandora development, which was meant to make available
6000 serviced plots, is an example of these interventions.
Regularisation as an intervention strategy to informality then became the dominant policy
in the post 1970s period, although it had a limited impact in Nairobi. In addition,
literature seems to be divided over the success of regularisation, quite often the defence
for regularisation has been that it is seen as a catalyst for future improvements to the
houses themselves. According to this line of thought, insecurity of tenure, as well as fear
of eviction is what limited the citizens’ involvement both in time and economic terms (De
Soto, 2001). By regularization, officials aimed for an improvement in the conditions of
the houses, this assumption has however been challenged by scholars who argue that
security in tenure is not always important or necessary for improvements in housing and
that time lived in a settlement is as important as anything else (Angel, 1983; Schteingart
and Boltvinik, 1997 in Castillo, 2000:27). To justify regularisation, De Soto, 2001 argued
that the poverty of the Third World is not the culturally based phenomenon assumed by
so many writing in this area, but rather grounded in well documented property rights.
People in poor countries exist as squatters, without legal title to their land, homes or
business.
If security of land tenure plays an important role, as established by Turner earlier on, then
it can also be argued that infrastructure carries a symbolic dimension since it gives
security in the land tenure, when legal tenure is not yet acquired (Syagga, 2002). In
addition, “perception of security is actually as important as real security of tenure”
(Varley, 1989; Castillo, 2000:27). Other authors have posited that regularization is
intrinsically connected to political manipulation (Castells, 1983; Fernandes and Varley,
1998; Schteingart, 1981) (Castillo, 2000:27). Another critique with regard to
regularisation states that the moment the land becomes legal it joins the land market,
resulting in the displacement of original settlers by making the expenses associated with
formality a burden to residents. This may not always be true, evidence from Nairobi
shows that the costs of informality can be enormous. For example the costs of
occupational and environmental hazards that informality creates, can be quite high
(Lamba, 1994; NISCC, 1997).
45
There also seems to be a dominant notion in the literature that somehow the poor have to
be protected from the effects of owning property, be it from the costs of the regularization
or from the ability to enter the land and housing market through the sale of their property.
Both these charges are flawed since this research and other empirical evidence (Mitullah
and Kibwana, 1998; Syagga, 2002; Castillo, 2000; De Soto, 2001) show that the costs
most settlers have to pay for services are higher before than after regularisation. In
Nairobi for example, water costs 8 times as much in informal areas compared to formal
areas (Syagga, 2002:50).
The notion that the poor have to be protected on account of the perverse effects of
entering the market, is a position ideologically based on the paternalistic premise
that the state must protect the poor, rather than allow them to make their own
rational and individual choices (Castillo, 2000:28).
If land and housing prices increase, the settlers will surely benefit from the increased
values, since they alone decide what to do with their property. On top of that, measures to
`protect` the poor through the confinement of property and selling rights usually backfire
(Azuela and Duhau, 1998 in Castillo, 2000).
The low cost of the regularisation programme, which is self-financed, and the high-yield
political returns make it extremely attractive to use as social policy. Besides the standard
regularisation/upgrading/servicing programmes, other comprehensive approaches include
a combination of legal, fiscal, regulatory and lands policies. The problem with
regularisation policies is that they have focused primarily on the issue of tenure, rather
than on a broader conception of the urbanisation logic. In other words, the assumption
that only through the legal transformation, the informal segments of the city could be
incorporated, ignored that regularisation was just a minor step in incorporating informal
settlements to the city. The complimentary dimensions of the urban problems related to
mobility, access to services and quality of life and provision of infrastructure, have been
completely ignored (Castillo, 2000:29).
Another misconception in regularisation is that, policies assume secure tenure means the
granting of individual title deeds. Evidence from Voi town, shows that security of tenure
can be granted to a group of people, through “community land trust”, a situation where
individuals have user rights, without owning individual titles (NISCC, 1997:8).
46
Enablement Policies
Caminos and Geothert, 1978 saw the problem of urbanisation in developing countries as
a problem of unstable political and economic systems, they also observed that social well
being was the privilege of a minority in power and the settlement process was largely out
of control.
Illegal developments are a consequence of unrealistic rules. Most planning and
building regulations in developing countries have been adopted directly and
uncritically from standards used in the economically developed countries of
Europe and the USA (Caminos and Geothert, 1978:198).
A limited sector of the population can meet these standards and as a result, most of the
dwellings built are below such standards and are therefore illegal (De Soto, 2001; See
study model Fig.2.1).
In an attempt to try and bridge the gap between supply and demand for dwellings, urban
researchers in the 1970s based their research on the growth and redistribution theory plus
basic needs theory. These researches resulted in strategies for: site and service and selfhelp housing projects; core housing, slum and squatter settlement upgrading; tenure
regularisation programmes; improved access to financial, managerial and technical
assistance; the stimulation of small-scale enterprises and informal sector activities in
project areas; and an attempt to expand the provision of public services (Burgess, et al.
1997:113). However, by the end of the seventies, these approaches could not provide
affordable solutions for the poor, and the solutions were not replicable.
In the 1980s, emphasis was on “integrated development projects” sometimes combined
with site and services to permit densification. These approaches were also rendered
unworkable due to the debt crisis and the structural adjustment problems of the mid
1980s. By the end of the 1980s, the “affordability-cost recovery-replicability” formula
was not achievable either, leading to a change of strategy at the beginning f the 1990s.
The policy measures in the 90s reflected the general goals of neo-liberal analysis: elimination
of
supply-and
demand-side
constrains,
withdrawal
of
state
and
encouragement of privatisation, deregulation and regulatory reforms etc. These
conditions made the neo-liberals turn to the concept of “enablement”, which was to
provide the theoretical underpinning of the new policy framework (Burgess, et al. 1997).
47
During this period, cities were increasingly seen as engines of economic growth, and
restrictive building and land use standards were increasingly being phased out (Syagga,
2002).
All the above efforts have not generated sustainable urban development, as we get into
the new millennium; the dominant orthodoxy is now sustainable livelihoods theory, with
a focus on poverty eradication. With regard to urban policy, emphasis will be laid on
privatisation and on private/public sector partnerships. All said and done, it is evident that
efforts made in the last forty years or so have not been able to cope with the demand for
affordable urban goods and services. It is unlikely that the new sustainable livelihoods
strategy will solve the problems of the urban poor and therefore those of informality, as
the capital required is out of reach for most third world countries.
The limited response by the Kenyan government to deal with issues of informal
urbanisation were due in part to an unsubstantiated fear that any policy that would foster
development would mean “opening the gates” to more illegality (NISCC, 1997;
Fernandes and Varley, 1998). Since the 1980s a number of agencies, programmes and
approaches have been tried in addressing the problem of informal urbanisation. These
have usually been disjointed efforts with overlapping goals and responsibilities, most of
them have been reactive by nature in that they address the effects and not the causes of
the problem (Syagga, 2002). Examples of these agencies operating in Nairobi include;
Pamoja Trust, Maji Na Ufanisi, Kituo cha Sheria to name but a few. The enablement
concept that the state has adopted in line with global preferences has had very little
impact on informal urbanisation, as the trunk infrastructure the state was supposed to
provide for marketised land development and the upgrading of settlements has not been
forthcoming.
Another shortcoming of the enablement policy is that different stakeholders who may
own private urban property have different capabilities to transform or urbanise these
properties. This may lead to uncoordinated procurement of urban space, although this
may generate the requisite variety, it may require some level of heteronymous decision
making in order to serve the collective good of the whole community/neighbourhood. On
the other hand, autonomy allows people to invest their energy and initiative in urban
48
space production, which has been proven to be a sustainable approach to urban space
production as per Habitat’s Local Agenda 21(UNCHS, 1996:407-9).
The above discussion on policies raises fundamental issues regarding informality and its
impact on the urban process of third world cities. It seems necessary to take advantage of
the positive attributes of informality, which can then form the basis for a suitable city
model for developing countries. I now turn to the argument for the case of “Diverse
Informalities”, as a basis for creating such a city model.
Re-conceptualising Informality (The case for “Diverse Informalities”)
For the purposes of this thesis, informality has to be re-conceptualised through a set of
new lenses in order to gain a deeper understanding of the urban process in Nairobi. As
shown earlier most studies on informality treat the phenomenon as homogeneous, yet this
may not be the case in Nairobi. This is the reason for opting to study this phenomenon as
a heterogeneous one or diverse, and if it turns out to be homogeneous, so be it.
The urban process involves the concentration of people in one place and the construction
of the physical structures that support their existence in the said place, resulting into
cities. Rossi sees the city as a man-made object consisting of two main elements, housing
areas and monuments.
The city has always been characterised largely by the individual dwelling. It can
be said that cities in which the residential aspect was not present do not exist or
have not existed; and where the residential function was initially subordinated to
other artefacts ( the castle, the military encampment), a modification of the city’s
structure soon occurred to confer importance to the individual dwelling (Rossi,
1982:70).
Similarly, Turner argues that;
Globally homes and residential areas occupy at least one half of all built-up land,
and that three-quarters of all human lifetime is spent there and about half of all
materials and harnessed energy is used in and for homes and neighbourhoods
(Turner, in Burgess, et al. 1997:166).
The dominance of residences in city composition, and the fact that informal urban
processes are predominantly residential justifies the indulgence of the discourse in
49
residential processes, for they are essentially urban processes. In Kenya for example,
most informal urban processes are exemplified by human settlements.
The urban process in most third world cities has been basically informal, but in the case
of Nairobi, this informality has not been homogeneous. Similarly, in Mexico City,
informality is heterogeneous, that is the reason why Castillo, 2000 used the term
“urbanisms of the informal” as a way of re-conceptualizing the complex nature of the
phenomenon of informality. In many cases the scale of informal processes is quite large;
in Brazil for example 60 to 70 per cent of the entire region’s construction is produced
informally. On this account, De Soto observes that;
the extralegal systems constitute the most important rebellion against the status
quo in the history of the developing countries since independence, and in the
countries of the former Soviet Union since the collapse of communism (De Soto,
2001:86).
It should also be highlighted that formal law is losing its legitimacy in many countries, as
people continue to create property beyond its reach. On this premise De Soto further
observes that;
If the legal system does not facilitate the people’s needs and ambitions, they will
move out of the system in droves (De Soto, 2001:177).
Legality has dominated most urban studies, where informal urban processes are
addressed without spatial considerations; very few authors have shown any awareness
of space. This study will focus on the spatial aspects of informal urban processes, it will
also re-emphasise the centrality of space and the role of design in urbanisation, a role
which has increasingly been diminishing. Fig.2.1 below shows the proposed model
through which the study can fill the current lacuna in the informal urbanisation discourse
for most African cities; this model is based on empirical evidence from Nairobi. It is the
conceptual tool that will guide the understanding of the urban process in Nairobi.
50
Urbanisation
Illegal
Formal
Serves small Pop.
Informal/ Diverse
Serves a large Pop.
Conforms
to Legal
Statutes
Legal
Survivalist; Primary
Intermediate; Affluent
Manipulates the Weaknesses of the
Legal Framework - Extralegal
Serves Small
pop.
Total
selfinter
est
and
disre
gards
the
Law
Ille
gal
It is based on the assumption that society adopts a capitalist mode of production and that society is not
Fig.2.1 Nairobi’s Urbanisation Study Model.
egalitarian.
Source: Author
The urbanisation process can be divided into three categories for purposes of this study,
thus the formal, the informal/diverse and the illegal. Both the formal and the illegal serve
a very small proportion of the population, the informal or diverse which forms the core
of this thesis serves the majority of the population. Informal/diverse urbanisation can
be further broken down into the sub-categories of; survival, primary, intermediate and
affluent, these diverse informalities are discussed in detail in chapter four.
In discussing informal urbanisation, informality will encompass the casual processes and
unofficial methods of procurement of urban space. Almost invariably, at least one aspect
of the urban space (Private sector generated), is informal; it may lack formal land tenure;
failure to obtain development permission; failure to satisfy planning and building
regulations or disregard of rent controls. It is financed, built and exchanged outside the
formal systems for mortgage lending, construction, rent control and sale (Rakodi, 1997).
51
I need to state here that there may sometimes be a tendency to romanticise informality,
as it apparently functions adequately for the urban poor. However, at the lowest level,
informality can be seen as a survivalist strategy, which comes into play due to the
collapse or inadequacy of formal public services. The collapse of public services occurs
when the state abdicates its functions of creating some level of equity among the citizens;
without equity the working classes tend to be marginalised by the state, leading to
informal processes (Rakodi, 1997). This means that informality comes into play by
default.
There also, has been a tendency for policy makers in most post-colonial
countries to keep blaming colonialism for the predicament many cities face today. This is
not tenable as many third world cities have been independent for approximately 40 years,
and yet to date they have not consolidated their governance/legal structures (Chabal and
Daloz, 1999). Colonialism can not be blamed for ever for the failings of these cities. The
African Big Man syndrome of patronage has played a major role in the current
dilemma, a dilemma that has also been supported by international aid agencies that have
financed corrupt African regimes.
With regard to governance at local level, Turner’s advocacy for autonomy at local levels
may be laudable, however in most third world cities the CBOs and NGOs that operate at
local level may not always be impartial. Evidence from Nairobi shows that many CBOs
are one wo/man shows, they lack transparency and accountability. The urban poor are
also unable to benefit from the ne-oliberalist’s view of growth through market forces, as
market forces are based on economic gain as opposed to social justice, and the urban poor
badly require social justice (Rakodi, 1997; Simone, 2002&2003).
From the foregoing, it is evident that informal processes are going to increasingly impact
and shape the urban process of third world cities. Whereas the strategy of master
planning in the 1960s/70s was not tenable, the strategy of enablement in the 1980s
actually degenerated into a theoretical discourse with little physical evidence of its
success. (Syagga, 2002). The strategies in diverse informalities which create “diverse
urbanisms” have to be understood in order to adequately address the mismatch between
supply and demand of urban goods and services in many third world cities.
It has been shown that space/spatiality is a major variable in the informal urban process.
In fact many actors often times adapt strategies that have spatial implications in their
52
endeavour of accessing urban goods and services. The discussion that now follows,
addresses informality and the centrality of space.
Informality and the Centrality of Space
Rather than being just an effect, space can facilitate or hinder social and economic
relationships, space therefore creates an important role in informal urbanisation as it
mediates socio/economic relationships. Many studies on informality rarely address the
spatial dimension, space and its manipulation is at the core of this thesis.
During the 1970s, a number of urban researchers looked at the physical patterns of
housing systems in order to compare how efficient they were in terms of land utilisation
and provision of infrastructure and services (Bazant S 1978; Bazant S et al. 1974;
Caminos and Goethert 1976; Caminos and Goethert 1978; Caminos et al. 1969; World
Bank. Urban Development and Padlo 1981- the “Bertand Model”). This work associated
with the boom in site and services projects, argued that for each socio-economic
condition, there were optimum patterns of development (Castillo, 2000). These studies
were commissioned as a result of the rapid informal urbanisation that was then taking
place in most third world cities. It goes without saying that the central issue in these
studies was space. The optimum solutions emanating from these studies were based on
two variables: efficient patterns of settlements and the level of services provided,
optimality and efficiency related to the street-lot frontage. These studies facilitated the
formulation of certain urban policies that were tested in the 1970s particularly in the site
and service schemes of the time.
Space has also been used as an analytical tool in the theoretical discourse of the Urban
Informal Sector (UIS). Dierwechter, 2002 engages in a theoretical discourse on the Urban
Informal Sector (UIS) and maps out six cities for purposes of spatial theorisation. These
cities are; the twin city, the ecological city, the city of systems, the behavioural city, the
malleable city and the differentiated city. He argues that most research in the UIS is
aspatial and that only very few authors have shown any awareness of space. He indulges
in “spatialising theory rather than theorising space”, and therefore once again
emphasising the centrality of space in informal urbanisation (Dierwechter, 2002).
53
During the post-colonial period, as mentioned earlier, spatial segregation continued to
be reinforced, but this time more as a socio-economic and cultural stratification as
opposed to racial. Earlier on, theories of residential differentiation had begun with the
Chicago School in the 1920/30s, which saw city growth as a colonisation of different
“quarters” by different income and ethnic groups. (UNCHS, 2003:17). Their successors,
the neo-liberal urban economists, regarded informal settlements as the natural response of
the market in providing housing and services for poor people: the housing and services
that they can afford (UNCHS, 2003). In general, three types of informal settlements can
be identified; squatter settlements, illegal subdivisions of either government or private
land and illegal transformations of government or private buildings (Syagga, 2002;
UNCHS, 2003).
One major characteristic of informal settlements is that most residents are poor, and in
discussing poverty, the spatial dimension has to be addressed. Poverty and slums
(informal settlements) are closely related and mutually reinforcing. The juxtaposition of
extreme wealth and poverty is not merely spatial: it is a functional relation: rich and poor
define each other. Similarly it can be argued that formal and informal define each other,
i.e. for there to be an informal situation, there must be a formal one. Because of this
symbiotic relationship it seems inevitable that most cities have slums.
Slums have grown as a seemingly inevitable part of modern life. Low-income
people find cheap accommodation helpful in their need to keep housekeeping
costs low enough to afford. To do this, they tolerate much less than ideal
conditions no doubt hoping to improve and move to somewhere better (UNCHS,
2003:62).
The informal city and the city of illegality, which comprises the slums of the developing
mega cities, have been shown by many scholars to be the base of the informal sector.
This is where services are poor or non existent; where residents are invisible to the legal
statutes and systems; and where harassment by the authorities is commonplace (UNCHS,
2003).
Space plays a central role in the formation of informal settlements, these settlements
can be categorised into three categories as earlier mentioned. The first category of
squatting became a large and profitable business in Nairobi, in the post independence
54
period. This business is often carried out with the active, if clandestine, participation of
politicians, policemen and privateers of all kinds. In most cases, the prime target was
public land or that owned by absentee landlords (UNCHS, 2003:82). Contrary to popular
belief, access to squatter settlements is rarely free and, within most settlements, entry fees
are often charged by the person or group who exerts control over the settlement and the
distribution of land.10 In Nairobi for example, the area chief distributes public land to
structure builders for a certain consideration. The structure owners in turn build structures
and rent them out to tenants, with the result that the majority of residents in these
settlements are tenants (NISCC, 1997; Syagga, 2002).
Squatter settlements are characterised with buildings built of all sorts of makeshift
materials, e.g. cardboard, polythene, re-used iron sheets, second hand timber panels etc.
There are almost no infrastructural services in these settlements; all the circulation
paths/roads get formed by the constant movement of people on the natural ground in the
gaps left between the structures. Water is sourced from mobile vendors, while the
dominant mode of sanitation is use of pit latrines. The physical fabric in these settlements
remains poor, as the structure owners cannot risk the costs of improvement, due to the
insecure tenure of settlement. This is because; the structures can be demolished without
notice, by absentee landlords or the government (Matrix Development Consultants,
1993).
Within these settlements, there exists a range of actors from owner occupiers to tenants,
subsistence landlords to absentee petty-capitalist landlords, and developers to rent agents
and protection racketeers.
Variety also exists in the legal status of these settlements; while squatter
settlements begin with an illegal occupation of land, over time some form of
security of tenure, if not formally recognised legal title, can be transferred to the
residents. In time, de facto legality can be implied by the simple fact of the
settlement not being demolished, and /or public services being provided (UNCHS,
2003:83).
The second category of informal settlements is unauthorised land developments or illegal
subdivisions. Illegal subdivisions refer to settlements where the land has been subdivided,
10
See the case of Mukuru Kwa Njenga in chapter 4.
55
resold, rented or leased by its legal owner to people who build their houses/businesses
upon the plots that they buy. These settlements are illegal owing to any combination of
the following: low standards of services or infrastructure; breaches of land zoning; lack
of planning and building permits; or the irregular nature of the land subdivision. In some
cases, farmers have found that the most profitable “crop” for their land is housing. Periurban land is transformed from agricultural to urban use by land owners who divide it
into plots for housing.
As in squatter settlements, most occupants of illegal subdivisions build, extend
and improve their own housing over time, and consider themselves to be owner
occupiers, which, de facto, they are (UNCHS, 2003:84).
In illegal subdivisions, the buildings are normally built of permanent materials, the
designs of these buildings may be sourced formally from registered consultants, but they
may not have the necessary local authority approvals, as shown by evidence from
Nairobi. The land owner will most likely have subdivided the land using registered
surveyors, and the subdivisions could even have official titles. In general only minimal
services may be provided in these settlements, e.g. piped water and unpaved roads. In
settlements arising out of subdivisions, owners/developers have to source power and
other urban services through their own means (Kamau and Gitau in Hansen and Vaa,
2004).
The third category of informal settlements is the illegal transformations of formal housing
through the process of extensions and alterations by users without permission, or in ways
that do not fulfil standards. This is now very common in government built estates all
around the world. The transformations which “informalise” the government built estates
often represent better conditions (better physical conditions, more services, and more
space per occupant, higher value, and better value for money) than the pre-existing
housing (Tipple, 2001; Soliman, 2002).
The ex-formal settlements generate a new hybrid architecture where the formal and the
informal merge, in fact over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish which
part of the built fabric was originally formal (De Soto, 2001). These transformations
come about due to the ability of the transformers to manipulate the existing laws in order
to maximise on the economic potential of their plots. The net effect of these settlements is
56
that the carrying capacity of the infrastructural services i.e. water supply, power supply,
sewage/drainage, road network etc. are stretched to high limits. The inability of postcolonial development structures to provide affordable serviced land leads to these
transformations together with affluent informalities by the well to do, as outlined in
Fig.2.1 and discussed in detail in chapter four.
All the above informalities are possible because of the availability of space, irrespective
of services and legal statutes; in any case the statutes are manipulated to the advantage of
the interested parties. This further confirms the centrality of space in the informal urban
process.
The foregoing theoretical and conceptual framework has highlighted the centrality of
space in the discussion of the phenomenon of informality. What follows now, is the
discussion on the urban history of Nairobi, where space as above will be shown to have
played a central role, in the making of this urban history.
57
3. THE URBAN HISTORY OF NAIROBI
Colonial Nairobi
Introduction
Nairobi like many African cities was established as a result of colonialism. The Berlin
Conference of 1884 and the scramble and partition for Africa led to the establishment of
African states and thereafter African cities (Ayittey, 1991). The bulk of the interior at this
time appears to have been characterised by dispersed settlement, although urban centres
may have left negligible archaeological traces due to the organic materials in which they
were constructed (Burton, 2002:4). These conditions seem to be characteristic to those of
Nairobi before the arrival of the railway, when the Maasai people used to graze and water
their cattle at what they called “Enkare Nyaribe” meaning a place of cold water
(Thornton White et al., 1948:10).
According to Zwanenberg and King, some evidence suggests that the site was earlier
used for trading by Kikuyu and Maasai women (Zwanenberg and King, 1975:263). At
that time, the East African region was already integrated in the Arabic-Oriental trade with
its centre at Zanzibar and on the coast around Mombasa, in what Samir Amin has called
the pre-mercantile period in Africa’s history (Amin, 1976). When the Imperial British
East Africa (IBEA) was founded in 1888, it based its economy on the continuation of an
already existing trade with ivory tusks, bee-wax, hides and skins, which was older than
the East African slave trade (Emig and Ismail, 1980:7).11
The Founding Years 1899-1905
Nairobi was established more than 100 years ago as a transit point for the Uganda
Railway. The Nairobi site was situated about midway between the port of Mombasa (327
miles away) and Kisumu on Lake Victoria (257 miles away) which were to be the two
termini of the railway line (Thornton White et al, 1948:10). Fig.3.1 shows the contextual
location of Nairobi. It was made a transit point based on the government administrative
11
The pre-mercantile trade was on a barter basis, which later changed to a monetary capitalist mode after
the establishment of colonial rule.
58
structure and some primary industries that processed raw materials for export to
European industries.12
From the beginning between, Nairobi was to be one of Africa’s largest inland cities and
an important location for industry. In 1900, Nairobi was designated as a town of 18Km²
of “previously owner-less land”, and by 1905 it was the capital of the East African colony
(Hirst, 1994:30).
Five years after being founded, Nairobi still had no town plan; it was all spontaneous
growth (See Fig.3.2). Although Hirst alleges that there was no town plan for Nairobi, in
fact there was the 1898 Plan for a Railway Town which was the outcome of a welldefined engineering task. The plan was clear cut in its “technical” handling of social
questions and highly efficient in its implementation of the class/race segregation and
division of space. The plan was part of the British strategy of gaining political
sovereignty over the Upper Nile region and Uganda. From the very beginning, it is
evident that appropriation of space, without consideration of local/indigenous land uses,
played a key role in the establishment of Nairobi.
The interests of the British government was to layout a town in the interior from where
the “King’s Rifles” could control this part of East Africa.
The railway line and the town plan were a dictate by the rulers in London,
spelling out a political message – to be heralded by the minds of the railway
engineers (Emig and Ismail, 1980:14).
The Plan for a Railway Town, only took into consideration the European employees of
the Railway, and the European and Asian traders. The plan completely neglected the
Asian labourers or Coolies and Africans.13 Nairobi was going to be a Railway Town for
Europeans with a mixed European and Asian trading post (Emig and Ismail, 1980:9). It
should however be pointed out that Navanlinna, 1996 argues that there is no evidence to
show that the Plan expressed notions of segregation by class and race. She goes into
rational and technical arguments to justify her opinion (Nevanlinna, 1996:96).
12
Unlike most Western Cities which were established because of trade and industry, Nairobi was
established as an administrative and transit centre. A small industrial base was established to service the
Western market.
13
This act of ignoring a section of the population, was later to haunt Nairobi, and is partly the reason for
the rapid informal urban process.
59
Fig.3.1 Contextual Location of Nairobi. Source Adopted from Burton, 2002:2
60
Fig.3.2 Nairobi Layout c 1900, Source: Adopted from Thornton White et al. 1948:11
The town soon began to grow rapidly, and for the first time there was a need to demarcate
the municipal boundary Fig.3.3. The outer borders of the town were decided arbitrarily,
but were drawn to encompass the entire Railway complex, the Indian Bazaar, the
Administration and the European Business Centre, the Railway quarters, the Dhobi
quarters and European suburbs area. The centre of this circular boundary was at the
Government Offices and formed a radius of approximately 2.4 Km (1.5 Miles)
(Halliman and Morgan, 1967).
During this period, Commissioner Charles Eliot introduced a hut tax and encouraged
European settlement based upon a policy of integrated development. Eliot found two
individuals who were to shape, not just Nairobi, but the whole ecosystem, by introducing
industrialised agriculture and forestry, and a national economy based on resource
extraction.14 The two men, Lord Delamere and Ewart Grogan, they were among the
14
It is during this period that the Western monetary and capitalist economy was being entrenched.
61
pioneer European settlers in Kenya. With the arrival of these early settlers, Eliot’s vision
of integrated development was swiftly changed, and separate development of the various
races established as policy. Here was to be clearly the beginning of social, political and
economic exclusion of the African majority.
Nairobi grew up in a haphazard way, with the usual wasteful and ugly results.
Like all new towns in new countries, it was utilitarian in origin and unplanned in
adolescence (Elspeth Huxley, 1935- Quoted in Hirst, 1994:31).
At this time, the removal of the town from the site was still being debated, but nothing
came of this debate, as nobody was absolutely sure how long the place would be there.
Writing in 1906, Winston Churchill argued that;
It is now too late to change, and thus lack of foresight and of a comprehensive
view leaves its permanent imprint upon the countenance of a new country.
In “My African Journey”, 1907 Churchill further observed that;
There already in miniature all the elements of keen political and racial discord, all
the materials for hot and acrimonious debate. The Whiteman versus the Black; the
Indian versus both; the settler versus planter; the town contrasted with country;
the official class against the unofficial; the coast and the highlands….in truth the
problems of East Africa are the problems of the World. We see social, racial and
economic stresses which rack modern society already at work here.
At the beginning, Nairobi did not have an African area or quarter, but in the East the
Railway was establishing the concept of working class dwellings or landies. The first
African housing was constructed near the shunting yards along what came to be known as
Landhies Road (Anderson, in Burton, 2002:141). Concurrently most of the Indians in
Nairobi, about 3,000 were all pushed into the six acres of the Indian commercial district
(the Bazaar). Due to this overcrowding in the Bazaar, plague broke out in both 1902 and
1904.
62
Fig.3.3 Layout of Nairobi c 1905, Source: Adopted from Hirst 1994:37
63
Bazaar Street c190415
Bazaar Street c 1924
Biashara Street 2005
Fig.3.4, Evolution of Biashara Street. Source; Nevanlinna, 1996:102;
Burton, 2002:205; Author, 2005
The Consolidation Period 1906-1926
By 1906, the colonisation of the city was being consolidated and designed, based on the
interests of the white settler population, and ignoring the interests of the Indians. The
15
The current Biashara Street was previously called Bazaar Street
64
Africans were not even considered residents, and could not hold freehold property in the
city-even if they could afford it (Hirst, 199:50). Eighty per cent of the city was reserved
for ten per cent of the residents.16 It was a “garden city” development based upon income
and social status-with the tropical complications of race and culture (Hirst, 1994:50).
From the beginning there were two Nairobi’s; Residential areas for Europeans and Asians
and official housing for Africans. But this was only half of it-the serviced half. From
1890, all the other Africans who were not employed by Europeans had been building
subsistence settlements through an independent informal sector development without the
benefit of Town Planning. Fig.3.5 illustrates what was happening at this time. As can be
seen there were several informal settlements for Africans including Kangemi,
Kawangware, Kileleshwa, Kibera, Masikini, Pumwani, Pangani and Mombasa. This can
be said to be the beginning of the formal/informal spatial divide, which has persisted to
date, and is at the core of this thesis.
By 1921, 12,088 Africans were living in these eight informal “villages”. During this
period, single women were already prominent among the property owners of Pangani,
and numerous lodging houses offered nightly accommodation to African travellers and
migrant workers (Burja, 1975).17 Nairobi’s European citizenry had however long viewed
the town’s unregulated African villages as havens of disease and criminality, and
advocated for their demolition as a sign of better social control and improved public
health (Anderson in Burton, 2002:142). Villages like; Pumwani, Kawangware, Kibera
and Kangemi are some of the original colonial era villages, that are still among the main
underdeveloped or slum areas of the city today.
During this period too, an absolute authoritarian system was established under the
governor. This was a system where the governed had little, or no participation in the
decision-making processes that affected their lives. There was massive political
intervention in the economy by the colonial state, including the transformation of
16
The marginalisation of Indians and Africans got institutionalised and became a structural feature of the
urban process of Nairobi.
17
The single women of Nairobi can be regarded as some of the earliest Kenyan people to fully embrace the
capitalist market economy.
65
Africans into wage labourers.18 At the same time, the commoditisation of land had
enabled Grogan (a pioneer settler), to grab “Enkare Nyaribe” itself. Grogan and Sharif
Jaffer had acquired 120 acres of land, from Museum Hill to Racecourse Road on a 99year lease, for a nominal fee. He later bought Jaffer out for £3,000 in 1910, and by 1929,
Grogan was asking for £60,000 for it. Some plots were sold, the rest went for £180,000 in
1948 (Hirst, 1994:45). At the same time, racial practices in place were conveniently
disguised as zoning. Although the 1923 Devonshire White Paper prohibited the
separation of the races in the Townships by legislation, the separation was done without
the legislation. The government openly prevented non-Europeans from buying plots in
certain parts of Nairobi (Hirst, 1994:51).
In an attempt to try and create a new residential area for Indians in 1919, three informal
villages including Mombasa, Pangani and Masikini, near Forest Road were pulled down.
All the people in these villages were moved to Pumwani the designated “Official
Location” for Africans. They still had to build the houses themselves, on a rough street
plan called Pumwani. This in a sense was the first experimental site and service scheme
in Nairobi (Nevanlinna, 1996:222). Fig.3.6 shows the layout plan of Pumwani and image
of the 1980s. There has been very little transformation in the 30 year period. In this
period of consolidation, 18,000 Africans or 60% of the town’s population occupied only
5% of the town’s land, at the same time in Kilimani for example, 200 people or 1% of the
town’s population lived on 5% of the town’s land (Hirst, 1994:53).19
It was not until 1921, that the municipality accepted responsibility for the provision of
houses for Africans, consequently “Kariokor” bachelor quarters became the first housing
project on which money £13,000 was spent. The buildings were very basic, no more than
a kind of barracks or hostel, with dormitories. The scheme was a failure, and one third of
the space remained empty, until the place was partitioned into “cubicles” for men only
(Hake, 1977, Hirst, 1994:63).
Consciously or unconsciously, the European settlers designed their city around a
personalised transport; first the horses, bikes and rickshaws, then the motor car ruled. The
18
This act of transforming Africans into wage labourers was supposed to severe them from their traditional
ways of life and integrating them into the capitalist economy – See Harvey, 1986.
19
This situation is similar to the conditions prevailing today, as approximately 60% of Nairobi’s population
lives in informal settlements, which occupy about 5% of the land area. See Matrix Development
Consultants, 1993; Syagga, 2002; NISCC, 1997.
66
first car appeared in Nairobi in 1902, and by 1928 with 5,000 cars, Nairobi was the most
per capita motor-ridden city in the world for Europeans (Hirst, 1994:65).20 In addition to
privatised transport, Nairobi was developed as an energy-intensive city with much
centralised services, with people commuting for both business and pleasure. This was
quite unlike similar sized cities in Europe or Asia at that time (Hirst, 1994:65). Most preindustrial towns were coal-powered, but the “city in the sun” wasn’t, it was powered by
oil, steam and latter electricity…..totally dependent on outside deliveries from its bigger
system.
Fig.3.5 Nairobi Layout c1926, Source: Adopted from Hirst, 1994:50/51
At the end of the consolidation period in 1926, Europeans owned plots totalling 2,700
acres while the Indians only had 300 acres for their residential purposes. The Africans
20
Harvey, 1986 argues that space and time are forms of social power, therefore in order to control time and
space, a car and home ownership make and attractive combination – See chapter 2.
67
astonishingly, didn’t have any except the nominal official housing. Some Africans
however owned property; these were single women who were prominent in the
development of Pangani village (Burja, 1975; Burton, 2002).
They built “Swahili” square houses, where they lived in one room and rented out the
others. They enjoyed some minimal security of tenure under the English law called
USUFRUCT, which is the right of enjoying the use and advantages of another’s property
short of destruction or waste of its substance (Hirst, 1994:62). Also, in 1926 a Town Hall
that the settler capital could be proud of was built. The architect of the building, Sir
Herbert Baker had emphasised the connection between architecture and political
progress-and the home making inclination (Hirst, 1994:82). The Town Hall, the
municipal offices, the law courts and other public buildings were to provide a combined
effect of power.
Due to the rapid growth of the town during this period, it was decided to enlarge the
municipal area in 1926 Fig.3.7.21 Prior to the enlargement of the municipal area, the
municipality had tried to address the issue of African housing. After the municipality’s
failure with its first African housing scheme in 1921 at Kariokor (Bachelors quarters), the
government built “Starehe” for its own African employees, at a cost of £40,000. In the
same year, 1926, it spent some £586,430 to house its expatriate officers (Hirst, 1994:94).
21
The decision to enlarge the municipal area was primarily a spatial one, in order to cater for urban growth.
Legal considerations came into play after the spatial requirements had first been satisfied.
68
Fig.3.6 Pumwani: Layout Plan, and View,22
Source: Adopted from Nevanlinna, 1996:278
22
It is evident that by the 1980s, the original 8 roomed 1920s structure had already been thoroughly
transformed into a 23 roomed structure, generally extending beyond the plot boundaries and encroaching
on the road reserves.
69
Fig.3.7, Nairobi Municipal Area c 1927. Source: Adopted from Hirst, 1994:86/87
The Intermediate Period 1927-1946
By 1927, T\the capitalist mode of production had now been well established in Kenya,
this allowed the colonial machine to proceed in exploiting the natural resources in this
part of Africa. Nairobi had rapidly developed into a Colonial Capital City, by way of a
cynical racial simplification of an alien “Class System” through a zoning policy that
ensured a pattern of segregation and social stratification, which laid the foundation for
massive structural maldevelopment that perpetuated informal urbanisation (Hirst,
1994:86).
During this intermediate period, the Westlands and Kilimani areas were zoned for one
house per acre, while the Upper Hill area was zoned for two houses per acre. Elsewhere
in the city, land speculation in the 1920s raised prices, such that when they collapsed at
the end of that decade, the level of debt left, threatened the future of White settlement. At
the same time, the British government loathed supplying loan capital for industrial
70
development in the colonies apart from the infrastructure to get the raw materials
transported, and for many years the Railway was the only industrial concern in Nairobi
(Hirst, 1994:93).23 In addition, Nairobi rather than providing a basis for sustained
economic growth was from the start a “parasitic city”-one that drains resources and
manpower of the whole country, for the benefit of dominant urban elite. Emphasis was
laid upon the importation of luxuries, rather than domestic production.
Low wage levels in commerce and industry inhibited the development of a stable urban
community, yet Nairobi’s African population nearly doubled between 1938 and 1947,
from 40,000 to 77,000. This increase in population is attributable to rural poverty in the
white highlands, where land had been expropriated by white settlers for increased
mechanised agriculture, making many people landless and thereby moving into Nairobi.24
Concurrently, there was also a changed attitude by the colonial regime, which encouraged
the formation of stable African urban families. The other reason for the increase of the
African population was the boom in business activities as a result of the Second World
War (Frederiksen in Burton, 2002; Hirst, 1994).
Lonsdale posits that African householders owned only houses they themselves had built
as permit-holders on crown land; they were not, strictly speaking with freehold
protection.
The tenants who rented their rooms were still less secure a collection of
individuals with their own strategies of survival, not the incorporated members of
an extended household that embodied a corporate power. This was perhaps the
chief reason why Nairobi’s male workforce so long remained migrant
(“Straddlers”) rather than urban and Nairobi’s women as often prostitutes as
wives (Lonsdale, in Burton, 2002:217).
Nearly all of Nairobi’s problems were to stem from the exploitative wage structure.
African wages were lower in 1934 than in 1929. In Uganda for example, average annual
earnings were 240 shillings, while in Kenya they were 60 shillings. Unlike the colonial
policy in other parts of British Africa, no sustained effort was made to create either a
23
This approach to industrial development, created a dependency syndrome for manufactured goods from
Western industries, which persists up to today.
24
The expropriation of land also ensured that Africans were forced to join the labour market, and into
mainstream capitalist economy.
71
prosperous contented rural population , or a settled urban workforce with decent family
life-in a period of substantial civic investment by…..everybody. In 1920 the direct
taxation from non-natives was only £50,000 while natives paid £650,000 compared to
1921 when non-natives paid £110,000 as opposed to £500,000 paid by natives. In
addition Africans had paid hut and poll tax every year since 1903. Therefore those who
say “Nairobi is not an African City” may be quite wrong-Africa paid for it (Hirst,
1994:94).
In the 1930s, the municipality and the state had to start planning the provision of housing,
health and social services for the workers of the urban employers, who needed their
increasing skills. In response to these demands, the bachelor housing was built, based on
the bed-space concept i.e. three bed-spaces in a 10´x12´ room as the standard (Hirst,
1994:96). In fact today’s informal settlements have adopted this kind of standard as they
are also growing on a 10´x12´ room module.25
One of the fundamental changes that took place in the early 1930s was that the “amateur”
period of civic management was over. Civic authorities had to lean on professionals. The
Town Clerk now had to be a lawyer, and a Local Public Health Authority had to be
established. In addition, in 1934 Mr. Howard Humphrey came to advice on the Ruiru
water scheme, and the envisaged sewage works. His firm of consultants based in London
became the Consulting Engineers for the long-term planning of the town (Hirst, 1994:97).
Even today Howard Humphreys Consulting Engineers, still play a major role with regard
to infrastructure provisioning.
In the 1930s “Eastlands” which was east of Racecourse Road, as per the 1901 ordinance,
housed 80% of Nairobi’s population. It was to be a working class area for both Africans
and Asians, but still each group living separately. In this Eastlands area “Eastleigh”
which was named in 1921, after an English railway town, was one of the few examples of
“Grid Layout” development (See Fig.3.8). In recent times, the originally single-storey
developments of Eastleigh have been converted into multi-storey developments. This is
one of the settlements currently undergoing rapid informal urbanisation.
25
The bed space module of 10´ x 12´ has persisted, and is prevalent in present day informal settlements.
See chapter 4, and the discussion of Mukuru Kwa Njenga
72
Fig.3.8 Grid Layout of Eastleigh, Source: adopted from Hirst, 1994:100
Several changes occurred between the wars. One of them was the “New Deal Thinking”
which gave rise to the concept of “Functionalism” in architecture and urban planning,
worldwide. Functionalism it was thought, despite existing political structures, would
improve everyone’s everyday functioning (Hirst, 1994:103).26 It was on this basis that
capital projects like the Group Hospital were conceived. This project was halted by the
Second World War, however other sectors of the economy boomed. Traders and large
farmers grew rich as programmes of social provision stagnated. Attracted by the boom,
the African population soared to 70,000 in 1941, in a total population of 100,000. Almost
all this new influx was housed in the new “illegal villages” (Hirst, 1994:103).
It is during this period that the crucial gap between the population and available jobs
widened dangerously, there was even a food shortage in 1942-43. In spite of this, some
new African residential areas were built. Ziwani was built in phases like Starehe, while
Kaloleni was under construction in 1944-45. Concurrently, uncontrolled “illegal”
26
Functionalism had its beginnings in the rational city concepts which were propagated by CIAM, where
Le Corbusier was the protagonist.
73
building was increasing, a kind of self-help welfare. After the war, even more settlers
came from Britain, with capital to “escape” from the labour governments’ welfare state,
and land values in Nairobi rose. It was at this time that Leo Silberman came to Nairobi.
He was a sociologist, with a reputation in South Africa and the UK. He presented his new
ideas in Town Planning to the municipal authorities who bought them. According to
Silbreman, there seemed to be an entirely new approach to urban Africa. This approach
centred on the idea of “neighbourhoods”- separate, self-contained residential areas for
workers, with their own social amenities, near their places of work (see Fig.3.10).27 These
ideas led to the Master Plan for a Colonial Capital of 1948, which forms part of the next
discussion.
The Period of Decline
After the Second World War, the position of the settlers was gradually weakened as
Nairobi got a Royal Charter to be incorporated as a city (Hirst, 1994:107).
In a radical departure from earlier policies that had drawn a migratory and almost
entirely male labour force to the town, Nairobi’s post-war urban design was to
include model estates for African workers and their families, who would become
permanent citizens (Anderson in Burton, 2002:138).
These were the post-war circumstances that led to the further expansion of Nairobi. The
Nairobi Master Plan was a report to the then municipal council of Nairobi, in 1948,
conceived as a key plan to the general physical, economic and social development of
Nairobi, over a period of 25 years. It took a South African team of professionals three
years to prepare.28
The multi-disciplinary team was led by; Prof. L. W. Thornton White, together with L.
Silberman and P. R. Anderson. This team comprising of an Architect, a Sociologist and
an Engineer respectively; was an innovative step in Town Planning history at that time,
anywhere (Hirst, 1994:105). In their Master Plan, the railway and the main arterial roads
had been re-aligned, but it was essentially the same colonial capital. The basic tenets of
27
This neighbourhood concept was not entirely new, as it had already been discussed in 1929 by Clarence
Perry. See Samuels, I. et al. 2004: 171.
28
This Master Plan was basically a spatial disposition of urban functions – it objectively showed the
centrality of space in the urban process.
74
the Master Plan were; to control private capital through public investment in
infrastructure of Roads, Rail and Electricity, so as to service modern industry effectively.
The plan was also to provide a technically impartial answer to the existing social
problems, as expanded production meant more workers in the city, who had to be
adequately housed to ensure social reproduction.
Functionalism, it was widely believed that through industrialisation and technical
development, all the economic and social problems of the city could be solved. Concrete,
steel and lots of glass with lots of light with plenty of open spaces were an attempt in
expressing universal human values as perceived by the new universal player-The
Multinational Company (Emig and Ishmail, 1980).29
In the Master Plan, the planning of neighbourhoods was going to affect Africans the
most-since they were going to be built by government or Nairobi Municipal Council. It
was going to prove to them and the outside world that responsible good government was
working (Hirst, 1994:106). The 1948 Master Plan, aimed to confine further growth within
the existing boundaries of the Municipality as determined by the 1926 Feetham
Commission, at 32.4Ml² (84Km²). Two exceptions were however made; part of the then
Kibra area was be taken into the municipality and a small enclave of forest reserve west
of Muthaiga as well as such industrial areas along the new marshalling yards as were
taken up. The inclusion of these areas raised no racial or political problem. Fig.3.9 shows
the central area of the 1948 Master Plan, which envisaged the Kenya Centre as the heart
of the central area. On the other hand, Fig.3.10 shows the layout of a Typical
Neighbourhood Unit, which was to be adopted for African housing areas.30
In 1948, there were many plans on the drawing boards, it was a busy time for architects,
the economy was booming, and permitted building heights were raised so that sevenstoried office blocks were very profitable investments (Hirst, 1994:108). At the same
time functionalism as a planning/design concept would free architecture from local
traditions and history. Its goal was to provide a respect for universal human values (Emig
and Ismail, 1980:38).
29
It is evident that the consultants were avoiding addressing the issue of African housing, instead choosing
to operate under the cover of functionalism.
30
Apart from the re-alignment of the railway line from the central station, including some roads, it can be
said that very few of the Master Plan’s proposals were implemented.
75
The forties and the fifties saw almost frantic activity to consolidate the Nairobi city
centre, and even the idea of a Group Hospital was revived, with the King George VI
(Currently Kenyatta) hospital for all races opening in 1950. The number of schools
increased to take 3,000 children. These schools were however not entirely built in
neighbourhoods as the Master Plan had proposed. It was felt that;
In the pre-literacy conditions of Africa, the school does not define the community
with clarity as it does in Europe.31 At the same time, the internationally very
fashionable Neighbourhood Unit Planning was used to justify segregation;
everybody had to have their own neighbourhood (Hirst, 1994:108).
Fig.3.9 1948 Nairobi Central Area, Source: Adopted from Thornton White et al. 1948.
31
The conflicting arguments for the expansion of schools and the proposal for neighbourhood units brings
to fore a common trait of contradiction in the colonial logic. See for example; Myers, 2003; Mitchell, 1991;
Berman, 1990.
76
In the early 1940s, the population of Nairobi was expanding rapidly because “landless”
people were being shaken out of the Rift Valley and Central provinces by increasingly
profitable agricultural production using mechanisation and farm chemicals as opposed to
hand labour. This influx of people in Nairobi increased the demand for working class
housing. At this time workers accommodation was calculated in “bed-spaces”. These
bed-spaces were increased by over 30,000 between 1946 and 1957, but there was still a
shortfall of 22,000.32 So in the period of prosperity and expansion in the city’s history,
most Africans saw blocked aspirations and frustrations of legitimate demands within the
system (Hirst, 1994:110).
32
In this regard, Turner argues that; it is what housing does for people that matters more than what it is or
what it looks. It therefore would follow that ; it is illogical to state housing problems in the modern
convention of “deficits” of units to some material standard (Turner, 1976).
77
Fig.3.10 Typical Layout – Neighbourhood Unit
Source: Adopted from Thornton White et al. 1948
Nairobi was granted the City Charter on 13.03.1950, with great ceremony, the Duke of
Gloucester handed the charter to the mayor, Alderman Woodley (Hirst, 1994:111;
Anderson in Burton, 2002:138). Subsequently Nairobi accelerated the expensive
provision of minority amenities. A new Racecourse, under the Jockey Club of Kenya was
built. The National Theatre, the first National Theatre in the commonwealth, was also
78
built. It was the first part of a cultural centre where people of high culture and position
could meet, in a well-to-do Nairobi (Hirst, 1994:112). Simultaneously, there weren’t
enough houses or jobs within the city, so people created their own jobs, for example
hawking. During this period, European attitudes to African housing were inevitably
driven by considerations of economy, which were all too often unrealistic. G. A.
Atkinson, a civil Engineer and advisor to the Colonial Office, noted the views of the
European community when he visited Kenya in 1953 to make a study of Nairobi’s
housing schemes.
Too much hope is put on a new method of building to produce a “cheap house” he
commented; There is no magic material which will build the perfect, permanent
house for only a few pounds, though quite a few people in East Africa still seem
to believe there is (Anderson in Burton, 2002:149).33
Despite all the planning, Nairobi was on the decline and was quickly becoming a “selfhelp-city” for the vast majority who operated an urban subsistence economy. In response,
the authorities put in place even more social control and repression, which caused more
illegal activity and inevitably crime (Hirst, 1994:113). The inability for Europeans to
formulate any social compromise made real conflict inevitable. The contradiction at the
centre of colonial hegemony was coming to a head.
The measure of inconsistency Sir Andrew Cohen wrote between the Dominion
and the Trusteeship policies remained unresolved, and time was running out. The
dual policy of separate development would no longer work and coming down
firmly on both sides of the fence, at the same time (Hirst, 1994:119).
This polarised situation led to a clear change in civic housing policy in 1957. It changed
towards providing family accommodation instead of single rooms and bed-spaces.
Africans were now to be encouraged to own houses often self-built on prescribed lines
for the emerging “better off” workers.
While Apartheid was being established in South Africa, the British had decided to “go
with” Africans who had a Western education in Kenya. It was a time of difficult
compromises as the state of emergency had earlier been declared in 1952. At the same
33
This attitude still persists today; many a politician and bureaucrats quite often blame professionals for not
developing low cost housing, when the actual problem is the management of the country’s resources.
79
time the establishment of Apartheid was important, as South African influences had been
very strong in Nairobi’s development. Civic housing spurted with new estates, but
unauthorised housing boomed even faster in the self-help-city. The professionals at the
time, many of them new in their jobs could only hold on to the guidelines of the Master
Plan. In the city’s history, 25,000 people crowded into Eastlands in 1960 alone, with
perhaps a total of 50,000 in Nairobi extra provincial district, causing serious
overcrowding resulting in increased crime, illegal hawking, street trading and illegal
brewing. As the “unregistered jobs” were created so “unauthorised shelters” were built on
a grand scale.34
While African housing was advanced on a tight budget, and within parameters thought
appropriate to the apparently limited requirements of the emerging African urban
working class, government resources were lavished on creating the image of a European
“city in the sun” in the hope of attracting international corporate investment. At the same
time corruption in municipal government was part of Nairobi’s colonial legacy that had
skewed the development of the city through policies of segregation, rating and
differential investment, but it also generated in Nairobi’s African citizens a deep
scepticism about the capacity of government to effectively regulate the urban
environment. In the shanties of Kaburini, Muoroumi, Mathare, Pumwani and Kibera,
Nairobi’s “self-help-city” took shape in the 1960s in defiance of government, resisting
control and regulation (Anderson in Burton, 2002:154).
By the eve of independence, in 1963, the Nairobi cityscape was already
characterised not by “model” housing estates, but by burgeoning shanties, whose
poverty and squalor stood as testament to the historic inadequacies of colonial
municipal government (Anderson in Burton, 2002:140).
The city faced independence in a crisis (Hirst, 1994:129). The city’s social problems
were temporarily eased politically, on attainment of independence in 1963.
34
As was shown in chapter 2, it can be argued that these activities were illegal in the eyes of the colonial
regime, but pretty much legitimate to the actors in these activities.
80
Post Colonial Nairobi
Overall Urban Process
At Kenya’s independence in 1963 the new African government opted for a policy of
continuity rather than change. Although the state continued to attempt to control internal
migration, it was unable to enforce restriction over African mobility with the ruthlessness
of its colonial predecessor (Burton, 2002:22). In addition, the institutional structures left
behind by colonial rule and initially little modified by the newly independent government
proved so ineffective in managing urban change. The post-colonial city experienced two
particularly significant changes in its character, which can be attributed to mass
urbanisation in the post-colonial period. The first of these was a dramatic alteration in the
gender balance of Nairobi’s population. The male to female ratio during the colonial
period was as high as 4-8 males to 1 female. This decreased in the post-colonial period to
a Kenyan national rate of approximately 1.38 male to 1 female in 1969 (Burton, 2002:24)
and 1.17 to 1 for Nairobi in 1999(GOK-CBS, 2001).35
The second phenomenon associated with mass urbanisation that transformed the urban
landscape of Nairobi after independence was the informalisation of the city, which
resulted in many informal settlements springing up.
Such informal settlements (as well as informal economic activity) have commonly
been associated with the urban poor. However, the informalisation of Nairobi was
a process which by the 1980s, if not earlier, had encompassed urban residents
from all social strata (Burton, 2002:25).
Political and urban history are closely intertwined; for major internal political changes
must always be presumed to have had an impact upon patterns of urbanisation. The
attainment of independence was a major political change, which led to the expansion of
the Nairobi city area.36 The city boundary was extended to include the Nairobi National
Park to the southwest, some peri-urban residential suburbs like Karen and Langata to the
southwest, Dagoretti to the west, Spring Valley to the north and a large extent of
farmland suitable for future development to the east (Nevanlinna, 1996; Hirst, 1994;
Morgan, 1970). With the extension, the area of the city grew to 684Km², with some
35
This gender balance increased the demand for family housing, in addition to forcing many families to
live in single rooms.
36
This decision was basically spatially motivated.
81
342,764 inhabitants. In some sixty years, Nairobi had grown from a town of 18Km² in
1900, with a population of about 10,000 people, to a metropolis of thirty-eight times its
area and more than thirty-two times its population. Table1 shows Nairobi’s demographic
and spatial transformation over the 99 year period, while the new enlarged city area is
illustrated in Fig.3.11.
This enlarged area meant hundreds of miles of metalled roads, power and water
supplies-unequalled anywhere else in East Africa (Hirst, 1994:138).
Table 1: Nairobi's Area and Population 37
Year
Area in (Sq Km)
1900
18
1906
Population
11,512
1919
25
1926
84
29,864
1936
49,600
1944
108,900
1948
91
1962
1963
118,900
266,795
684
342,764
1969
509,286
1979
827,775
1989
693
1,324,570
1999
696
2,143,254
Source: Halliman and Morgan, 1967; Kenya Population Census, 1962, 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999
37
This table brings to fore, the centrality of space on the urban process of Nairobi. Population and urban
growth have a direct impact on the spatiality of the urban area.
82
Fig.3.11 Nairobi City Area, 1964, Source: Adopted from Hirst, 1994:138/139
From the colonialists, Nairobi also inherited a multicultural society in which privileges
had been unevenly divided. Halliman and Morgan indicated the discrepancies in
residential densities and population densities between the different parts of the city as
shown in Table 2. In terms of racial composition, 71% of the Africans lived in Eastlands,
68% of Asians lived in Parklands and Eastleigh while 82% of Europeans lived in Upper
Nairobi.
On attainment of independence, the classification of residential areas based on race i.e.
European, Asian and African changed to a classification based on income/social status
i.e. High-income, Middle-income and Low-income. Geographically, Upper Nairobi is on
higher ground over 5,500Ft above sea level and has well-draining red coffee soils.
Eastlands on the other hand is on flat terrain about 5,200Ft above sea level, with poorly
draining black cotton soils (Morgan, 1970; Thornton White et al, 1948).
83
Table 2:
Residential and Population Densities
( Based on 1962 Census Survey )38
Location
Residential Density
Population Density
(Dwellings/Acre)
(Persons/Acre)
26
125.9
8.46
47
Eastleigh
4.47
47
Upper Nairobi
1.15
6
Eastlands
Nairobi South
Parklands and
Source: Adopted From Nevanlinna, 1996:205
In addition to the foregoing, there were problems the Master Plan never dreamt of, or
gave a technically impartial treatment. For example, Nairobi inherited a racially divided
school system, with widely unequal facilities. They were quickly converted to A, B and C
schools-open to all.39 At that time many African middle-class parents, were able to get a
car before a “good house”, and therefore ferried children to school across the city (Hirst,
1994:138).
This practice of ferrying children to school across the city is still prevalent today, and is
one of the reasons why Nairobi experiences traffic jams. Fig.3.12 shows a typical
morning traffic jam in Nairobi as in March 2005.
38
The current population densities in the various Nairobi residential areas closely follow this 1962 profile.
Although all the three school categories were open to all, not all people could afford the fees in the
various categories. This state of affairs, further entrenched segregation on economic lines.
39
84
Fig.3.12 Traffic Jam on Haile Selassie Avenue, March 2005
After the initial teething problems and the political excitements about “UHURU”, the
economic realities of city life started to reassert themselves in painful choices. It was now
time for the new African ruling elite to deliver urban goods and services to the residents
of Nairobi. It is a well known fact that the priorities in even the most heterogeneous of
cities have to be decided by somebody. This is how in 1965 UN experts said that Nairobi
would need 26,300 new housing units by 1970. The Bloomberg and Abrams report
(1965), reiterated the position of previous colonial reports of the 1950s, which had shown
that housing for Africans was inadequate and insufficient (Syagga, 2002:86). After this
report, a project team for implementing the report’s recommendations was set-up at the
city Hall. This team produced 5,000 new, good quality houses in the five year period up
to 1970. After this five year period, it became quite clear that conventional housing
schemes could not do the job (Hirst, 1994:140).
The transformation to a truly urban population was going slowly. Most people were
living a dual culture, with strong connections to a rural homestead. This is what John
85
Lonsdale refers to as “straddling”. They hope to invest their urban income in improving,
or at least saving, their farm lands “back-home” (Hirst, 1994; Lonsdale in Burton, 2002).
This transient phenomenon of the majority of Nairobians could have hastened the
proliferation of informal settlements in post-colonial Nairobi. Empirical data shows that
as early as 1964, in addition to Mathare Valley and Dagoretti, there were 49 other
settlements in the city, built without official permission and services. This number had
risen to 199 by 2002 (Hirst, 1994:141; Weru, 2004). Another reason why transience
persists could be the representation of Kenyan urban centres as places where people do
not strike roots. White, Robertson and Lonsdale have demonstrated that these
representations are gendered.
A dominant discourse has emerged on the relationship between town and
countryside in Kenya, where “town” has been equated with “women”, idleness
and immorality, and “countryside” has been equated with “men”, hard work,
honour and morality (Frederiksen in Burton, 2002:234).
The S. M. Otieno case in the early 1980s also brought to fore the chronic tension between
urbanism and tradition in Kenya (Atieno-Odhiambo, 1992).40
In 1971, it was estimated that one third of Nairobi’s population i.e.167, 000 people were
living in unauthorised housing and were creating 50,000 jobs, and many worked in the
formal sector in the lower-income group (Hirst, 1994:144). At that time, the policy
towards this unauthorised housing was demolition; resettlement was not a city priority.
The policy even intensified in 1970, as it turned out to be very useful for the new class of
landlords, while the city’s policy with regard to housing was the provision of fully built
units. The new council houses continued to be the more expensive ones, built for tenantpurchase but sub-let on a large scale, creating capital assets for landlords from public
funds, but paid off by new tenants (Hirst, 1994:148). Examples of these schemes include,
Uhuru and New Pumwani (California). Although these schemes were not really
successful, the National Housing Corporation still uses this 1960s model of housing
40
S. M. Otieno a prominent Nairobi lawyer died and was forced to be buried in his ancestral home in
Nyanza. This was against the wishes of his urban wife, Wambui Otieno, who wanted him buried at their
home at Upper Matasia on the outskirts of Nairobi. The ensuing court battle was settled in favour of the
rural clan, who argued that the Nairobi “home” was a mere “house” and that the real home was in
Nyalgunga-Nyanza.
86
procurement. They have recently completed new tenant purchase houses in the Pumwani
area, (see Fig.3.13).
It was increasingly clear that no conventional housing schemes, such as the city
departments were equipped to deal with could meet the demand for very low-cost houses.
Fig.3.13 NHC’s Tenant Purchase Housing – Pumwani – April 2005
NGOs were increasingly getting involved in human settlement issues during this period,
and were introducing new ideas; these new ideas had to be looked at. These included: self-built principle; core house projects; site-and-service schemes; site-and-phased-inservice projects etc. (Hirst, 1994:148). During the same period, as house prices and rents
rose, many people were forced out of formal housing, into the informal housing of mud
and wattle houses. Some became owner occupied, but the majority were increasingly
built for rent. As a result, the so-called “squatter” settlements are in fact private
developments often by entrepreneurs, outside the legal frameworks, indicating the failure
of the official system in meeting the people’s needs.
87
After independence, the informal sector which had always been there, started to make
itself felt in the economy. For example, the monopoly franchise for the city transport held
by Kenya Bus Services Ltd (KBS), could not cope with the post 1963 demand for public
transport at affordable cost, so private taxis came on the scene. In the early 60s,
approximately 400 illegal vehicles charged a standard fare, “Mang’otore Matatu”, i.e.
30cents from the residential areas into town, often pursued by the police. In 1973, after
10 years of independence, the “Matatus” were legalised and their numbers multiplied.
The demand for transport continued to increase, and by 1992, there were about 2,000
Matatus in Nairobi. They were creating jobs mostly for drivers and conductors (Hirst,
1994). Currently Matatu transport is the most common mode of transport, not only in
Nairobi but in the whole of Kenya. Fig.3.14 shows Matatus in a Nairobi street.
Fig.3.14 Matatu Public Transport - Ronald Ngala/Mfangano Streets – April 2005
Because of the many developmental problems facing the city of Nairobi in the late 60s,
the Nairobi Urban Study Group (NUSG) was established in 1970. It was to plan a co-
88
ordinated growth strategy for the city until the year 2000. It reported in 1973, through the
publication of the Metropolitan Growth Strategy (MGS).
Like the Master Plan of 1948, the MGS continued the liberal ideology that
dominated the Master Plan. The politicians assign technicians to plan, so that the
plan can be characterised as politically neutral (Emig and Ismail, 1980:80).
The MGS was a tool for state intervention, which supported the interests of the
hegemonic class alliance of the local bourgeoisie and the Multi National Corporations
(MNCs). The interests of the urban majority were neglected, in a similar way as the three
preceding colonial plans. Segregation was used based on economic and class lines as
opposed to racial and class lines.
The MGS formed the basis for an application for World Bank assistance in the housing
sector. This resulted in the city council’s Dandora project which started in 1975. There
were to be 6,000 serviced sites in this project, targeting the very-low and low-income
groups. However, the target group was never really reached; somehow the low-income
groups got squeezed out, as 70% of them became tenants (Hirst, 1994:152; Discussion
with City Director of Housing on 26.04.05). Today, the single-storey dwelling units are
being converted into multi-storey mixed use developments, putting pressure on the
infrastructural services. Fig.3.15 shows some of the transformations taking place in
Dandora.
89
Fig.3.15 Transformations in Dandora - April 2005
Since 1978, there has been very little council intervention in the provision of urban
services. This has been exacerbated by the neo-liberal theories of 1980s of less state
intervention and affordability-cost recovery-replicability formula. What has been
happening in Nairobi in recent times is the emergence of an informal modernism,
particularly in Nairobi’s Eastlands. Moneyed Nairobians have found a lucrative niche in
the low-income bracket, where they are building mixed use rental commercial high rise
blocks for the urban poor Fig.3.16. This exploitative rental housing and poor transport
have alienated many Nairobi citizens, who are beginning to question the whole “idea” of
the city, and whether it is even sustainable (Hirst, 1994:167). In addition to this informal
modernism, there has been a proliferation of informal settlements, as mentioned earlier.
There is no data on who actually owns these settlements (slums).41 Some land on which
people are squatting is actually privately owned, but the majority is government land.
41
Urban property is shrouded in secrecy, which in turn propagates corrupt practices. See chapter 2,
Re-conceptualising urbanity in developing countries.
90
Evidence however shows that in the Nairobi situation, there are no squatters as such;
rather there are illegal landlords who are collecting rent from illegal tenants (Hirst,
1994:171).
Fig.3.16, Informal Modernism – Block 10, Embakasi Feb 2005
Production and Consumption of Urban Space
The main variable that determines how an area urbanises is how space is produced and
consumed (Rossi, 1982; Castells, 1983). In the colonial period, the public sector (colonial
regime) was the sole producer of urban space, where the most striking aspect was the
logic of partitioning urban space into two zones. The “European zone” and the
“Indigenous zone”, in the case of Nairobi, there was a third “Asian zone”. This partition
was done, not through any dialogue or consensus, but wholly on the whims of the
colonising power, which made the colonial city heterogeneous and segregated.
In the post-colonial period, Nairobi’s urban form and for that matter its production and
consumption remained basically colonial. However, post-colonial Nairobi has
91
increasingly experienced a mismatch between the needs of the ever increasing population
and the provision of public services and infrastructure.
Urban management systems are generally unable to keep pace with infrastructure
needs and in some cases have all but collapsed (Rakodi, 1997:560).
Fig.3.17 shows the Nairobi Central Matatu terminus; an example of collapsed
infrastructure services. Because of the mismatch in demand and supply of urban services,
the informal sector has increasingly become the main producer and consumer of urban
space. The discussion on informal production and consumption of urban space in Nairobi
is at the core of this thesis.
Fig.3.17, Matatu Terminal - Central Bus station. April 2005
Over the years, post-colonial Nairobi has evolved from an overly regulated city which
reflected the needs of the erstwhile colonial powers to control African urban life in every
possible way, we are now witnessing the birth of a new city form which reflects the new
African reality of limited resources. What could be called the “self-help city” in the
1970s could as well be called the “informal city” in the 1990s. Another characteristic of
92
post-colonial Nairobi is the high level of poverty among its population. According to the
Global Report on Human Settlements 2001;
While urban poverty exists and is indeed growing in all cities of the world, it
characterises aspects of the rapidly growing cities in developing countries
(UNCHS, 2001).
Thus the urbanisation of poverty is one of the most challenging problems facing the
world today and Nairobi at the local level. These high levels of poverty are having a
major impact on the production and consumption of urban space. Urban space is
predominantly being produced informally, as can be seen in Fig.3.18 depicting some
images of informal Nairobi.
Fig.3.18, Informal Nairobi. February 2005
I argue that the process of urbanisation generally involves the concentration of people in
one place, which then generates a need for the production and consumption of space. In
the ensuing process, several variables come into play some of which are: - Who are the
main actors in this process-individuals, builders, financiers, public sector, private sector
etc.; What/how are the legal structures supporting these processes; How are design issues
with regard to-density, set backs/height restrictions, aesthetics, technology and use of
materials, infrastructure and carrying capacities etc. determined and by who? All these
variables play a role in determining the urban space produced, which to a large degree
determines the city form. In the colonial period and the immediate post-colonial period,
the main actor in the production of urban space was the government (public sector), and
as discussed earlier, the general public and the private sector who were the consumers of
this product (urban space), played an insignificant role.
93
The planning proposals developed by the government for Nairobi, could not capture the
speed and direction of growth in the peripheral areas, and in any case, these proposals
were almost never supported by the level of capital expenditure necessary to implement
their infrastructural projections. This led to the emergence of the informal sector as a
major player in the production and provision of urban goods and services. Unfortunately
this sector, although filling the gap left by the state, tended to be filled by operators who
were mostly driven by the profit motive, and quite often, did not act in the public interest.
Fig.3.19 shows a single roomed rental commercial residential block, an example of how
the rich are exploiting the urban poor, by developing compromised dwelling
environments.
Fig.3.19, High Rise Blocks, Mathare North. August 2004
One common feature of post-colonial African cities is that the governance and legal
structures supporting the production of urban space are replicas of 19th/early 20th century
structures in Britain, France and Portugal. In fact one of the most influential sources of
colonial legislation was the British Town and Country Planning Act of 1932. This was
94
the source of urban planning legislation in Kenya, Tanzania and the Rhodesias and was
also behind the Nigeria Town and Country Planning Ordinance, proclaimed in 1948
(UNCHS, 1996:98).
The application of these laws inevitably created uneasiness in many urban settings.
Myers, 2003:126 highlights the tension in the colonial city with regard to squatting,
prostitution, slum clearance and police raids. He further illustrates how neo-colonial
tendencies have dominated most post-colonial Africa, in particular there has been over
reliance on foreign consultants in matters regarding urban space production. In socialist
Zanzibar, Karume relied on consultants from the German Democratic Republic (GDR),
while Jumbe relied on Italians. Kenya’s capitalist Kenyatta relied on the British as
Malawi’s Banda relied on South Africans etc. In the case of Karume’s Zanzibar, colonial
enframing strategies were re-packaged in socialist-dominated packages (Myers, 2003).
Rakodi, 1997:38 on the other hand deplores the inherited British ideology of impartial
officials guided by notions of technical rationality, advising elected councillors who
viewed the exercise of power as a moral non-political activity, as this was inappropriate
in a post-independence situation. With regard to urban management;
Traditional economic variables of (land, labour and capital) have to be understood
within the frameworks of urban economies. Organisation of city management
should therefore have a significant economic and business orientation. This
dimension has been lacking in the tendency to focus on the supply orientation of
urban management (Rakodi, 1997:550).
There have been major transformations in formally planned settlements of Nairobi during
the post-colonial period. One of the reasons for this occurrence could be the impartiality
of municipal officials towards urban change. For example, the USAID funded Umoja
Housing Estate, built in the 1970s has succumbed to commercial interests, which have
taken advantage of the land values and urban economics of Umoja. This estate has
gradually been transformed, with high rise apartment blocks replacing the originally
single storey structures. In a city like Nairobi, which lacks adequate serviced land, and
has a high demand for affordable low-income housing, it does not make economic sense
to have single-storey structures on the Umoja site. Fig.3.20 shows how Umoja estate has
transformed over the years, as impartial council officers watch.
95
The above kinds of transformations are occurring because the law and official agencies
have been trapped by early colonial and Roman law, which tilt towards protecting
ownership (De Soto, 2001). This in effect creates a fertile ground for the proliferation of
extralegal laws. The rapid transformation that has occurred in the last 30 years in Nairobi
has revealed the failure of formal planning, as there has been a mismatch between the
supply and demand for urban goods and services. Informal processes have therefore
taken over formal processes by default.
Umoja 1978 (part plan)
Umoja 2003 (part plan)
Fig.3.20, Transformations of Umoja
To understand the resilience of informal urbanisation in Nairobi, one should not
underestimate the limited role that urban planning has played in the last 30 years or so
(Emig and Ismail, 1980; Hake, 1977; Abudho, 1991). Plans, programmes, strategies and
decisions taken from the perspective of planning, have historically been tools to reinforce
the processes of social and political exclusion. Planners oftentimes have just been pawns
in the broader agendas of politicians. Friedman, 1988 in “Florentine New Towns” makes
the above assertion quite clear, by demonstrating how politics dictated urban design in
the late Middle Ages. Plans have often been posterior documents for foreign credit or
political consensus building, as was seen by the MGS with regard to the World Bank loan
for the construction of Dandora. Political decisions have preceded plans rather than the
other way round.
96
In Nairobi the plans for a Railway Town, a Settler Capital, a Colonial Capital and even
the Metropolitan Growth Strategy (MGS), were all political instruments for managing
change.42 Planning within a political system of monopolistic power serves to reinforce
hegemony rather than operate as regulatory framework. Many urban plans are limited,
due to lack of a strategic vision, which renders their policies only reactive to urban
conditions. In the past the government used housing policies for political co-optation
rather than to resolve the pressing problem of providing dwellings to the increasing urban
population (Castillo, 2000). In addition, urban planners’ conventional practice of ignoring
informal developers and accepting their subordinate role to political agendas makes urban
planning extremely difficult. This has increasingly left the production of space in the
hands of informal developers.
Planning, Regularisation and Upgrading
Conventional wisdom that informal urbanisation is unplanned development has limited
evidence in empirical studies. The reality is that most informal urbanisation involves a
wide range of mechanisms and strategies that are implemented to create a form of
physical planning. In Nairobi for example, many roadside entrepreneurs start of by
staking space along the road with some mobile platform for the display of their wares.
After sometime they erect a timber framework around the platform and cover it with
polythene paper. Eventually they seal the sides of the framework with timber off-cuts,
sheet metal or boarding and cover the roof with metal sheets. 43 In some instances they
even connect electricity to their structures either officially or illegally. In this way they
consolidate their operations and often claim legitimacy to the space they occupy. Fig.3.21
shows one of these roadside enterprises in its consolidated state with power connection.
42
These plans were basically instruments for the manipulation of space. A process made possible by
abstracting and commoditising space as discussed in chapter 2, see also Lefebvre, 1979.
43
See Fig.4.7, in chapter 4.
97
Fig.3.21, Consolidated Enterprise – Block 10. Feb. 2005
Quite often, the structures which are built informally get formalised with time, through a
process of regularisation. Regularisation is the procedure by which the state grants legal
title to individual dwelling owners occupying space through informal means. In doing so,
they expect the settlers will make their own improvements. Regularisation along with
upgrading of services and infrastructure, are the two-pronged dominant strategies
planners use to address informal urbanisation in Nairobi and other cities. Most research
has shown that regularisation has been closely tied to political patronage, consensus
building and party favours. This is very similar to what plans have been used for as
discussed earlier. Quite often, many settlements can exist for years without getting
services, if residents are unable to organise and use political pressure to satisfy basic
services such as water, sewage, roads and electricity.
From the beginning of the colonial period, official planning did not address the needs of
the African majority in Nairobi, by assuming that they did not exist. In late colonial
Nairobi, a period during which planning authorities began to address these needs, they
were still unable to meet the demand for urban goods and services by the African
98
population. This led to the proliferation of “informal planning” which filled the gap
created by official planning. After independence official planners continued to ignore the
informal urban process, in fact informal settlements did not appear on official maps, yet
on the ground they were a reality. The speed of informal urbanisation was just too fast for
the formal processes to respond to.
Planners are in a weak position because they are unable to compete with many
unauthorised settlement entrepreneurs, because they are unable to apply sanctions
against developers who promote land sales outside the law and because they are
usually perceived as the body responsible for picking up the bill for servicing and
legislation once the land has been alienated (Ward, 1984-quoted in Castillo,
2000:22).
Planning as a professional practise has basically been confined to urban areas. According
to Kenyan history of census taking, an area is classified as urban if it has a population of
more than 2,000 inhabitants, and has a defined extent or boundaries (Nalo, 2002:4).
Nairobi as the largest urban settlement in Kenya is also the epi-centre of informal
urbanisation. With regard to informality, 30% of Nairobi’s population or 635,036
inhabitants, based on the 1999 census figures live in Nairobi’s informal settlements. The
Nairobi Informal Settlements Coordination Committee (NISCC), 1997 reckons that 55%
of Nairobians live in informal settlements, while Syaaga, 2002 argues that the consensus
is that 55-60% of Nairobians live in informal settlements.44 Whatever the figure, the main
issue is that the number of people living in informal settlements is substantial, even at the
current population of over three million people; we would still be talking about one
million people living in these settlements. The planning of Nairobi can not afford to
ignore this size of population, which contributes to Nairobi’s economy even if
insignificantly.
In Nairobi the security of tenure is closely linked to planning issues, authorities do not
formally recognise informal settlements because the land on which they stand is not in a
“planned” area i.e. was not set aside by the planning authorities as a residential area
(Nalo, 2002). Planning is therefore part and parcel of the regularisation/upgrading
44
If 60% of Nairobians live in informal settlements, and assuming that 50% of the remaining population
participates in the informal process, then about 80% of Nairobi’s population in one way or another plays a
role in the informal urban process. Refer to Fig.2.1.
99
process of informal settlements. From 1963 until the late 1970s the attitude towards
informal settlements (like in many Third World Countries) was to demolish them.45
Subsequently there was a trend towards tacit acceptance of these settlements, which led
to their rapid growth. At this time the authorities adopted a laissez faire approach, of
tolerating these settlements, generally not undertaking demolitions but not initiating any
improvements either (NISCC,1997). A major departure to the above scenario however
occurred in 1990, when two large settlements, Mouroto and Kibagare, were razed down
by the city authorities, and an estimated 30,000 people were displaced (NISCC, 1997;
Hirst, 1994).
One characteristic feature of informal settlements is that the physical layouts are
relatively haphazard, making it difficult to introduce infrastructural services. Quite often,
urban services are non-existent or minimal, water may be provided to a few standpipes, if
it is provided at all. Most residents do not have access to adequate sanitation, education
and health services are also inadequate, although some NGOs and CBOs make significant
contributions in this area (NISCC, 1997:2). The majority of house owners have some
type of quasi-legal tenure through Temporary Occupation Licences (TOL) or letters from
Chiefs where structures are on public land or agreements with land-owners when
structures are on private land. In Nairobi therefore there is very little true “squatting”.
However, in some settlements there is no form of tenure and residents have no rights
(NISCC, 1997). The majority of residents are renters and most structures are let on a
room-by-room basis with most households occupying a single room or part of it.
It is worth noting that although many residents of informal settlements have jobs in the
formal sector; the majority earn their living in the informal economic sector, in small
businesses ranging from hawking to service and production enterprises. Of the
approximately 40,000 small businesses in Nairobi the great majority are in informal
settlements. In other words, informal settlements are an integral part of the city economy
yet, in terms of services, place few demands upon it (NISCC, 1997:2). In some
settlements such as Kangemi, Kawangware and Githurai (which were originally part of
rural Kiambu), there is individual freehold tenure. In these settlements land owners have
more incentive to invest and to work jointly with others in improving services. In these
45
See chapter 2 – Settlement Demolition Policies
100
“private” settlements the proportion of absentee landlords is much less than those on
public land.
The majority of settlements are on public land, either held directly by the central
government or vested on leasehold to the Nairobi city council and/or public corporations.
These settlements normally have higher densities and worse conditions, sometimes much
more than those in privately held land. An attempt to regularise and upgrade, Mathare
Valley one of the settlements on public land hit a snag due to conflicting interests of
structure owners (Slumlords) and tenants. Fig.3.22 shows some images of Mathare 4A,
started in the mid 1990s but has since stalled. The Mathare 4A upgrading project was
supported by the German NGO GTZ.
Fig.3.22, Images of Mathare 4A. August 2004
Many other NGOs/CBOs have also been involved in upgrading projects in various
informal settlements. One example is the upgrading project by Pamoja Trust, in the
Huruma area of Nairobi. This project involved the demolition of temporary structures on
a 30Mx36M plot. The plot has then been built with 34No. Multi-storey family units with
a total of 54M² spread on three levels with 18M² on each level. The uniqueness of this
project is that most of the building materials were prefabricated on site. Fig.3.23
illustrates the outcome of this Huruma project as at April 2005.
Whereas the intervention of NGOs/CBOs by way of upgrading settlements is welcome,
the efforts are not well-coordinated. They are also very small in scale, and spread over
many settlements, making their impact on improving the residents’ standards of living
insignificant. What is actually required is to mobilise adequate resources, which can be
used in upgrading a large enough settlement, which can be replicated over time. On this
101
regard the Huruma project offers a useful intervention strategy, if it can be implemented
on a large scale.
Fig.3.23, Three Dimensional Upgrading, Huruma. April 2004
In settlements on public land, plots have been allocated in a number of ways by officials
to individuals. In some instances a plot is allocated with a Temporary Occupation
Licence (TOL) by the local authority, which allows a temporary building to be
constructed. Quite often, buildings of the lowest possible standards remain standing for
many years. Most are barrack type blocks let to tenants by absentee landlords. These
constructions are quite similar to 1921 colonial bachelor quarters at Kariokor, earlier
discussed in this chapter. Allocation of plots is also undertaken by Chiefs (Local
Administration Officials) by means of a letter or verbally (NISCC, 1997:3).
Empirical evidence shows that the Chief’s allocation is done in conjunction with the
Village Chairman at a consideration of 5,000 shillings per room to be built. None of these
practices/processes accords with the provisions of Kenyan land law but they have been
practised with little challenge for many years. Clearly such a system of allocation,
102
informal but officially sanctioned, provides benefits to some officials and underpins a
system of patronage (NISCC, 1997:3). The results of this system are mainly negative.
Profits accrue largely to absentee land/slumlords, haphazard layouts prevent the
introduction of services and densities/overcrowding seriously endanger the health of
inhabitants. It must however be remembered that these settlements do provide cheap
accommodation which the poor can afford, something which the formal sector, be it
public or private, has been unable to achieve.
These subdivisions and allocations result in the many informal settlements dotting the
city landscape (Fig.3.24). It is these settlements that are the subject of regularisation and
upgrading.
Fig.3.24, Partial Layout, Typical Informal Settlement
103
It should also be noted that; Nairobi as a city will simply be unable to achieve its full
potential as a worthy capital and engine of the nation’s growth if the majority of its
citizens are unable to achieve their own potential. NISCC argues that security of tenure is
fundamental in unblocking the potential of residents of informal settlements to use their
own resources to achieve development. Informal settlements should therefore be
regularised and formally integrated into the physical and economic framework of the city.
In trying to integrate some of these settlements within the city, Zimmerman an informal
settlement to northeast of Nairobi, was recently, given a blanket approval to be a formal
settlement. Although it is hoped that some owners may take advantage of their newly
acquired title deeds as a result of formalisation, evidence has shown that they may not
improve the physical environment of the settlement, not to mention the construction of
infrastructural services.
104
4. DIVERSE INFORMALITIES
Introduction
In chapter three the discussion on the urban history of Nairobi, revealed how formal
planning strategies adapted from the colonial period had failed in the post-colonial
period. The failure of these strategies, which were designed to contain settlement rather
than suggest growth, created the conditions for informal urban processes to proliferate
and to fill the void left by formal planning. The emergent informal processes ranged from
those of the poor on the one hand to those of the affluent on the other, with the survivalist
being the most purely informal and the affluent being the least informal (see Fig.2.1).
These informal processes are in principal extralegal practises, which are undertaken
because of the failures of the formal process to provide the necessary commercial and
residential needs of the population. They manipulate and take advantage of the
weaknesses of the legal framework, and range from entirely illegal on the one end to
those that in small ways add on to or redesign legal/physical structures.
These practices are not homogeneous as generally discussed in most literature on
informality; they are heterogeneous and are also not the preserve of the urban poor.
Evidence in Nairobi has shown that informal practices which I will refer to as “Diverse
Informalities” are practiced by all socio-economic groups of the Nairobi population.
These informalities are classed informal because they are not fully formal, although
they may have certain aspects of formality within their structure. For examples hawkers
may operate with or without a licence, and even if they are licensed, they are not taxed
and are therefore not fully formal. Similarly many informal settlements have some
official recognition, usually by way of temporary occupation licenses. But the plots on
which they are built have not been subdivided formally, and the buildings built have no
formal approval. These varying degrees of the legal status of the businesses/settlements
contribute to the diversity of the informalities.
Over and above the legal status of the informalities, the physical/spatial dimension
these informalities acquire is a central concern for this thesis. Survivalist
informalities are to a large extent mobile or transient, and therefore are not fixed to a
specific location. On the other hand primary informalities, dominated by informal
settlements are characterised by the subdivision of land and the construction of buildings
105
informally. Intermediate informalities are characterised by the informal construction of
new settlements and the transformations of existing settlements. Like intermediate
informalities, affluent informalities are also characterised by the construction of new
settlements and the transformation of existing ones. However this category is dominated
by people from the high income group/affluent members of society.
The very low income groups adopt survivalist strategies, while the low and some middle
income groups engage in primary informal practices. The middle income group on the
other hand practice intermediate informalities as the high income group engages in
affluent practices. The separation of these informalities provides a more nuanced and
accurate description of the informal urban process in Nairobi. The categorisation is not
absolute as the boundaries are seamless, with certain characteristics shared by all the
forms of informality and others unique to one or the other form of informal practice. The
different informalities, impact differently on the urban fabric and infrastructure, with both
the survivalist and affluent having the least impact, whereas the primary and intermediate
categories have the most impact. The categorisation is basically a study tool in
reconceptualising informal urbanisation. At their core, what I have called “Diverse
Informalities” shared a number of characteristics.
Common Traits in these Informalities
•
Diverse informalities have their basis on individual effort, which results in sole
proprietorship. These practices are therefore not subject to lengthy bureaucratic
decision making processes, which mean that failure and success are borne
individually.
•
Diverse informalities are small enterprises; depending on circumstances, the sole
proprietor may hire additional hands in order to achieve her/his goals. This
additional assistance rarely exceeds 4-5 people, meaning that the operations
remain small scale (small enterprises).
•
Diverse informalities fill the void left by the failure of the formal urban process,
in other words they are a default urban strategy.
•
Diverse informalities produce products of extremely varied standard and high use
value i.e. they are flexible and utilitarian.
106
•
Diverse informalities grow progressively through accretion or addition, as
opposed to complete packages.
What follows, are descriptions and examples about what makes each of these
informalities different. To begin with, Fig.3 below highlights the salient attributes of each
category of informality, and then the detailed analysis of each category will follow.
Table 3. Categories and Salient attributes of Diverse Informalities.
Category
Survivalist
Primary
Intermediate
Affluent
Type of
No tenure since it is Letter of Allocation, Secure Tenure
Secure Tenure
Tenure
Mobile/transient
or Temporal Occupat- Normally Leasehold
Absolute or Lease-
ion License (TOL)
For 99 Years
hold for 99 Years
Characte-
Transient in nature
Place based and
Settlement based,
Settlement based,
ristics
with a bias to
Complex.
focusing on
biased to residential
Commerce and
Dominated by Low
residential and few
developments.
dominated by the
and Middle Income
commercial activities. Dominated by high
urban poor.
Groups.
Dominated by Middle income groups.
May operate with or Require license from Income and a few
Commercial activities
without License.
not undertaken.
council to operate.
High Income players.
Engage in residential Settlements can be
and commercial
new or extensions/
Activities.
Modifications.
Impact on
Minimal impact
Most prominent
Has large variety of
Generates all types
Built Fabric
on built fabric.
physically and
building types.
of architectural
impacts heavily on
Uses standard
styles-eclectic.
the built fabric by
approved materials.
Little overall impact
way of kiosks and
Builds on labour
on built fabric as they
107
settlements.
contract at different
are in low density
Uses all sorts of
times and locations.
Zones.
materials, s/hand and
recycled.
Impact on
Prey on water,
Infrastructure electricity and
sanitation systems.
Make legal or illegal Puts additional
Takes advantage of
connections to
pressure on services.
well serviced land.
services.
Builds services on
Puts additional
self-help basis.
pressure on carrying Doubtful quality of
capacity of services. design and constr.
Costs
Requires small sums Requires tens/ hund- Requires millions of
Requires large sums
of money to start up. reds of thousands.
shillings to operate.
of money.
Pays minimal license Pays minimal fee to
Pays statutory fees.
Pays statutory fees.
Remains statutorily Subject to demolitio- Development plans
Lacks social ameni-
Illegal
ties, and travels long
fee to the council.
council.
Pays protection fee
to youths/police.
Other
ns with or without
Notice.
may be illegal.
distances to access
them.
Source: Author
Survivalist Informalities
Survivalist informalities are not place specific; they are mostly transient in nature with a
bias to commerce. From a legal perspective, they may or may not have a trade/operations
license, and because they are not place bound, they have no land tenure, and therefore
108
irrespective of whatever form of legitimacy they may have, they remain statutorily
illegal, as temporal licenses to not grant full legal status. These informalities require little
start up capital, and are thereby dominated by the urban poor (very low income groups),
although some low and middle income people may be players through proxies. Their land
tenure and legal status, makes it impossible for them to access development funds from
formal financial institutions. The most viable option of accessing funds is to borrow from
their own small circle of peers, who may have formed a savings and credit society. This
society can then lend small amounts of money, depending on individual shares, on a
rotational basis.46
Survivalists are generally poor, which means they spend their productive time on
subsistence activities and have little time left for collective group activities. This makes
them vulnerable and politically weak, and therefore subject to political manipulation,
underpinning a system of patronage. Since survivalist informalities are mostly transient,
they have minimal impact on the urban built fabric. However, as they mostly operate in
circulation corridors, they tend to congest these corridors thereby disrupting normal
functions. With regard to infrastructural services, their tendency is to use water,
electricity and sanitation systems through illegal connections, consequently denying the
council much needed revenue.
However, all said and done, irrespective of all the
shortcomings of these informalities, they provide a means of an urban livelihood for the
poor, even if marginal.
The existing regulations of local authorities through by-laws and enforcement practices
often restrict the economic efficiency with which the poor can pursue their trading,
artisanal and other service provisions. These regulations are actually those designed by
the colonial regime, but have remained intact even after the attainment of independence.
Africans were not supposed to engage in other income generating activities other than in
government employment, formal private sector employment or as domestic workers for
Europeans (Bujra, 1975; Hake, 1977; Emig and Ismail, 1980; Burton, 2002).47
46
These arrangements are not integrated into the formal property system, and are not fungible (De Soto,
2001).
47
As discussed in chapter 3, a policy of continuity rather than change was adopted in the post-colonial
period.
109
Today the urban poor have devised various strategies of survival, for example water
vendors charge inflated rates of between Kshs 10 and 20 ($ 0.125-0.25) for a 20 litre
jerrican, while those who operate community water points charge Kshs 2-5 for the same
amount of water (Lamba, 1994; Mitullah and Kibwana, 1998). My own findings at
Mukuru Kwa Njenga in March 2005 show that vendors sell a 20 litre jerrican of water for
Kshs 3-5, which means that the cost of water has little changed in the last 10 years.
There are several other income generating activities which the poor engage in, as they
struggle to participate in the capitalist urban economy, literary living on their own
“wits”.48 Some of these activities include; mobile street vending; vegetable vending
commonly known as (mama mboga); maize roasting; handcart (mkokoteni) transport;
shoe shining; roadside tree nurseries and flower ports; roadside blacksmithing; railway
line petty trading etc. Those who operate within the Central Business District (CBD),
tend to congest street pavements making it difficult for pedestrian movement. These
street traders have been a source of conflict between the city authorities and formal shop
owners, as they disrupt the normal operations of shops. Quite often the city inspectorate
department carry out raids where vendors are arrested and their wares destroyed since
many of these vendors do not have official permits to trade. Much as this scenario may
look gloomy, these informalities however, create a means of survival for many who are
otherwise unable to find space in the formal urban sector.49
Survivalist informalities have no land tenure, since they are generally not place based but
transient. The most transient vendors carry their merchandise on their shoulders and
move from place to place, soliciting for buyers. Such vendors, though found all over the
city, are more dominant in residential neighbourhoods that are near the CBD, like Shauri
Moyo, Eastleigh, and Nairobi West etc. Many Nairobians who live in these
neighbourhoods buy from these vendors, which in turn perpetuates this kind of activity.
Some transient vendors focus on motorists, and walk up and down the streets, particularly
Uhuru Highway. Several motorists in the end do buy some of these wares, which are
principally electronic/electrical products like mobile phones/chargers, aerials, extension
cables etc.
48
See for example; Cooper, 1987; Burja, 1975 etc.
As was discussed in chapter 2, a similar scenario prevailed in Paris for more than 300 years, and was
only stopped by the French revolution.
49
110
Other survivalist informal operators occupy space on a daily temporal basis, where they
set up shop in the morning and wind up at night fall. Vegetable vendors typically operate
in this manner; Fig.4.1 illustrates such a vendor in the South B shopping centre. Here the
vendor (mama mboga), places her vegetables which can include; cabbage, spinach,
onions, tomatoes etc. on a low level wooden framework, and waits for the numerous
passers-by to come and buy. Typically mama mboga’s operations at the outlet spot starts
at around 10.00 hours, the early morning hours are spent on making wholesale purchases
at Gikomba or Wakulima market near the CBD. During the day, the business is rather
low, but peaks between 17.30 hours and 19.00 hours, the time when many people are
going to their residences after their daily chores. Because of the low income levels, many
residents make daily purchases, as weekly/monthly shopping is reserved for the few rich
residents. Many people buy their vegetables from these vendors as there are no other
vegetable selling points. The supermarkets and other council markets are too few and are
far in-between, creating a void which if filled informally by the numerous mama mbogas.
This category of “informalities” does not in general claim any user rights to the space
they use, although some vendors may use space continuously until they are able to claim
some user rights. The roadside Tree Nursery and Flower Pots vendor on Limuru Road
Fig.4.2 and the Tree Nursery on the Jamhuri access road Fig.4.3 are examples of vendors
who use the same space/place continuously.
111
Fig.4.1, Mama Mboga – South B
Fig.4.2 Roadside Flower Pots
Fig.4.3 Roadside Tree Nursery
In this particular case, these vendors are operating on road reserves, which have
remained undeveloped over many years. This brings to focus the issue of how big/wide
road reserves should be, and how should they be maintained and by who? In a situation
of limited resources and lack of job opportunities, undefined road reserves (see
discussion on urban edge in chapter five), offer a good opportunity for the urban poor to
112
carry out their subsistence activities. Other operators who have taken advantage of
undefined/undeveloped road/railway reserves are the Jua Kali blacksmiths at Landhies
Road-Shauri Moyo Fig.4.4, Jua Kali shoe/clothes dealer at City Stadium Fig.4.5 and
Petty traders along the railway line at Mutindwa-Buru Buru Fig.4.6.
Fig.4.4 Blacksmiths
Fig.4.5 Shoe/Clothes Vendor
What is striking about this group of vendors is that they are consolidating their premises
by building temporary structures to protect them and their products from the elements of
the weather. These vendors make deliberate strategic spatial decisions in choosing
the locations of their operations. The railway reserve vendors at Mutindwa-Buru Buru
and at Laini Saba-Kibera are located on major pedestrian thoroughfares. Many residents
in Umoja estate cross through Mutindwa on their way to and from the CBD, industrial
area and other parts of Eastlands. Similarly the Laini Saba pedestrian thoroughfare is the
main access to the eastern side of Kibera from the CBD and many other places outside of
Kibera. In fact the main matatu terminus at Golf Course estate is located at the head of
this thoroughfare.
Survivalist vendors may start initially by occupying space and displaying their
merchandise on temporary stands. This may evolve into the stands being enclosed by
timber supports with polythene covering the top of the supports. Eventually, the timber
supports can be improved to become screens/walls made of timber or metal sheets, while
the polythene cover gets replaced with corrugated iron sheets. The original stone/timber
stand can be replaced with timber worktops including the creation of lockable storage
space. At this point the activity ceases to be survivalist, and graduates to the primary
113
category, as it now becomes firmly place based Fig.4.7. 50 The above scenario clearly
shows that the strategies taken by this type of vendor are not social, political or legal
but spatial, thereby emphasizing the centrality of space in the process.
Fig.4.6 Mutindwa Petty Traders
The maize Roaster in Mukuru kwa Njenga, shown in Fig.4.8 is likely to take the kind of
trajectory described above, where the umbrella, will be replaced by a wooden framework
and polythene roof cover, and eventually into a fully fledged kiosk. At that point the
vendor could diversify into trading in other commodities, while the maize roasting can
continue to be done on the outside. These are some of the survival strategies vendors
adopt, which may take months or even years to accomplish. This is why places/spaces of
informality undergo rapid transformations, such that informal space today, looks quite
different than it looked a few years ago. Nearly all these vendors apart from the most
transient pay some nominal fee to the council for their annual business licenses. Although
these licenses give them some form of official recognition, they remain statutorily illegal.
50
See footnote 43.
114
Fig.4.7 Evolution of a Kiosk
Survivalist informalities have minimal impact on the urban built fabric. Many vendors
like mama mboga, operate under the sky in the hot sun (Jua Kali). Those who have built
temporary structures like the blacksmiths at Shauri Moyo Fig.4.9 and the traders along
the railway at Laini Saba-Kibera Fig.4.10, tend to concentrate/crowd in one place. The
result is that, patches of these types of activities spread all over the city and thereby do
have some minimal impact on the overall urban built fabric.
Although the Jua Kali blacksmiths at Shauri Moyo make metal products like trunks,
pails, water dispensers etc. they are unable to break out of the survivalist category. One of
the reasons for this static scenario could be that; they are using archaic technology, which
relies heavily on physical strength for hammering the metal into shape. The other is that;
the premises on which these blacksmiths operate, has no secure tenure, making it
inappropriate for them to invest in advanced fabrication technologies. Their products
therefore remain sub-standard and are unable to fetch higher prices on the market. These
conditions condemn the blacksmiths to the survivalist category of informality, as their
investment is not “fungible” as De Soto would say.
115
Fig.4.8, Roadside Maize Roaster
Fig.4.9, Shauri Moyo Blacksmiths
Fig.4.10, Laini-Saba Traders
There are other activities like the hardware dealers at South B, Fig.4.11, who although
operating from the same place on a continuous basis, have not built any enclosure for
their activities. They have only built wooden/metal stands on which they display their
wares, otherwise like mama mboga; they also operate under the sky.
116
Fig.4.11, Assorted Hardware Dealers – South B
Survival informalities impact on the infrastructural services negatively, since the many
illegal connections made to water and electricity supplies, are liable to leakages and
power surges. The council and the lighting company, also loose a lot of revenue through
these illegal connections, as they are unable to charge vendors who have made such
connections. The majority of operators, who are unable to make illegal connections for
the supply of electricity can only, operate during the day. Often the premises for these
activities become a security risk as they turn into havens of muggers and other criminals
on nightfall. The lack of sanitary facilities also presents a major environmental problem.
Quite often vendors create alliances with business people who have sanitary facilities in
the neighbourhood, thereby gaining access to these facilities. In the event that such
alliances are not possible, then the vendors just pollute the immediate surrounding area.
The survivalist category is the easiest and cheapest category that can be accessed by the
urban poor. It requires little money to start up business, with or without a license from the
council. Some people from high income groups however, engage in business in this
category though proxies for their own monetary gains. Players from high income groups
buy merchandise in large quantities, which they then distribute to several hawkers who
117
sell them on the behalf of the absentee players. Often these hawkers who act as proxies
are paid on commission basis depending on the sales turnover. The commissions paid are
generally small, with the net effect that the absentee players are simply exploiting the
unemployment situation of Nairobi.
Primary Informalities
Primary informalities are place specific and complex, and engage in both residential and
commercial activities. Normally, being place based, they would have some form of land
tenure however marginal, it may be in the form of an allocation letter from a government
administrator or a Temporary Occupation Certificate (TOL) from the local authority.51
Unlike survivalist informalities which may or may not have a license, primary
informalities generally must have trade/operations licenses, which they pay for annually.
For one to operate in this category, it requires tens to hundreds of thousands of Kenya
shillings to set up shop, meaning that this category is dominated by the low income group
and some middle income people, who are able to raise such funds. Most low income
operators would normally be resident, while middle income players would normally be
absentee players, who rely on resident middle men for their transactions.
This category of informalities tends to have strong peer group associations, where they
are able to save money for lending to each other and for actualising any other common
projects. They are however unable to access funds from formal financial institutions,
because of their temporary land tenure situation, as Temporary Occupation Licenses do
not qualify as collateral for lending purposes in these financial institutions.52
Primary informalities, being place based, have a major impact on the urban built fabric.
For example, all the kiosks and informal settlements that dot the city landscape fall in this
category including the numerous garment stalls (so called exhibitions) that have sprung
up, mostly in the CBD. They create employment for many people, particularly local
artisans (fundis), who get hired to construct the said kiosks, dwellings and stalls. These
constructions utilise all sorts of materials ranging from polythene, timber boards, iron
sheets, recycled drums etc. The lack of design input means that the resultant built fabric
51
52
See Table 3.
For a discussion on peer group associations, see De Soto, 2001: 90.
118
is a collage of various typologies, whose architectural merits are doubtful. The kiosks are
normally located on main circulation corridors or as adjuncts to houses in low and middle
income residential areas. Dwellings in this category would be located on public or private
land, after the structure owner has paid a fee to public administration officers or the
private landlord. In some instances, structure owners invade public or private land and
build their structures without any agreement.53
Most dwellings in this category are built for rental purposes, with the majority of the
structure owners being absentee landlords. The temporariness of these informalities,
forces the structure owners to pay protection fees to the police or political party youths,
so as to give some form of protection from demolitions. These structures are normally
subject to demolitions by the government or landlord, with or without notice. In some
cases, settlements are known to have been burnt down in an effort to displace the settlers.
It should however be noted that the temporary occupation license (TOL) issued by the
city council gives more protection to structure owners, but such licenses are few, because
the commissioner of lands controls the delineation of land and the city council has no
control over his/her actions. The majority of structure owners therefore end up just
getting letters of allocation from the local chief, which are subject to manipulation and
abuse.
Primary informalities may also have a negative impact on the city’s infrastructural
services, as often they make legal or illegal connections to these services, putting
additional pressure on the design carrying capacity of these services. Quite often, these
connections increase; the frequency of water shortages, possibility of sewage blockages
and overloading the power supply, leading to power cuts. The illegal connections also
deny the relevant authorities much needed revenue. Most kiosks are also built on road
reserves, and sometimes on top of drains, they therefore increase the occurrence of
flooding during the rainy seasons of March-May and September-November of each year.
The decisions of establishing and choosing the location of these activities are
primarily socio-economic and spatial. Many operators may not be aware of any legal
53
See NISCC, 1997; Matrix Development Consultants, 1993 for a discussion on the establishment of
informal settlements.
119
requirements in establishing their activities, and even if they may be aware, they would
rather feign ignorance.
Primary informalities form a major sector of the city economy, and create employment
opportunities for many people who are unable to join the formal sector. This category
also generates a regular income for the proprietors, who unfortunately are outside the
formal tax brackets, and therefore do not pay any taxes on their income. Like their
survivalist counterpart, primary informalities perpetuate a political system of patronage,
since they require continuous protection from big men.54 Their individualised character of
operations makes it difficult for them to organise themselves into a viable political force,
and therefore remain perpetually marginalised.
Market Stalls (Exhibitions) in the CBD
Evidence shows that a typical exhibition in Nairobi’s CBD measures approximately
6mx30m, and houses about 30 stalls/sales benches. Each stall/sales bench occupies about
3m² and is manned by one or two sales persons. All the stall owners clean their work
spaces on a regular basis, but the overall cleaning of the whole sales space is done by
employees of the landlord. The license to operate the business is paid to the council by
the landlady/lord, who also takes care of the security of the premises. The landlady is also
responsible for the payment of water and electricity. Typically the premises are fitted
with metal grilles to the street front, and watchmen are in addition hired for security
during the night. Sanitation facilities at the back of the sales space are shared by all the 30
tenants. Each tenant pays Kshs 500 ($ 6.25) daily rental fees to the landlady; this fee is
collected by the landlady’s agent who could also be one of the tenants. It is common for
many stall owners to purchase their goods/merchandise from Dubai in the United Arab
Emirates or one of the East Asia free ports, on a monthly basis.
From an economic point of view, the landlady gets an income of Kshs 15,000 ($187.5)
per day, which translates to Kshs 360,000 ($ 4,500) per month. This is more than three
times the rental income the sales space would fetch were it to be let to a single tenant. It
therefore makes economic sense to let out the space in the form of stalls/sales benches. In
effect what is happening in Nairobi’s CBD is that; the external survivalist informality on
54
Chabal and Daloz, 1999 discuss the system of patronage in many African countries.
120
the streets is increasingly being internalised. The invasion of shoppers’ territories in the
1990s forced many shop owners to convert their shops into “exhibitions”, which in
essence are internalised market places, Fig 4.12 and 4.13 are some examples of these
stalls.
The stalls create employment for many job seekers of Nairobi who would otherwise
remain unemployed. The average pay for a sales person is between Kshs 100 and 150
($ 1.25-1.875) per day, although some stall owners prefer to pay the sales people on
commission basis. Typically they pay a negotiated commission on daily sales which
average about Kshs 3,000 ($ 37.5). With these levels of daily income, the sales people
can only afford to live in informal settlements, where the rents range from as low as
Kshs.200 ($2.5) per month, for low quality rooms in Mukuru to over Kshs.1, 000 ($ 12.5)
per month for higher quality rooms in Kibera (Syagga, 2002b).
Fig.4.12, Interior Nairobi Stalls - Moi Ave. Fig.4.13 Stalls – Tom Mboya St.
Alecky Fish and Food Kiosk
Another primary informality arises from the many kiosks that dot Nairobi’s urban
landscape. Alecky Fish and Food Kiosk which is located at the entrance of Imara Daima
estate off Mombasa road is an example of this. The story of Adhiambo the proprietor of
this kiosk is also an example of the many people who are responding to the effects of
Structural Adjustment Programmes.55 Adhiambo who was in her late 30s, at the time of
the survey, was previously employed by Kenya Extelecoms. She was retrenched in 1998,
and with the golden handshake money, she received as her terminal dues, she opted to
55
See the discussion on SAPs in chapter 2, under Re-conceptualising Urbanity in Developing Countries.
121
venture into the fish and food business. The decision for this venture was purely socioeconomic, however in order to achieve her goal, she had to get some physical space, and
hence the kiosk. She opened the outdoor fish vending business in year 2000, with the
food kiosk opening in 2001.
Adhiambo pays several annual license fees to the local authority in order to operate the
business; these include a license from the Fisheries Department of Kshs 600 ($ 7.5), Food
and butchery license of Kshs 10,000 ($ 125) plus a public health license of Kshs 1,200 ($
15). There are no services provided by the council to the kiosk, and water has to be
bought at a nearby vendor’s tap, which sells a 20 litre jerrican for Kshs 5 ($ 0.0625).
There is also no sanitary provision and most customers have to rely on facilities at their
work places (most customers come from nearby companies and estates). Pressure lamps
are used for lighting in late evenings, although some adjacent kiosks have made illegal
power connections from the adjacent Villa Franca estate. The 55 Kiosk owners at this
location have made a welfare association, which hires watchmen who provide night time
security.56
In terms of procurement of the kiosk, the area chief allocated the space (land) which is on
a road reserve. Adhiambo bought the space from the first allottee at Kshs 20,000 ($ 250),
and spent approximately another Kshs 30,000 ($ 375), building the kiosk using local
artisans (fundis). Fig 4.14 shows the layout of the kiosks on this road reserve, while Fig.
4.15 shows images of Alecky Food and Fish Kiosk. The kiosk which opens seven days a
week creates employment for 2 kitchen staff who get paid Kshs 120 ($ 1.5) each per day,
and 2 food servers who are paid Kshs 100 ($ 1.25) each per day.57 In addition there is
another assistant employed to man the outdoor fish stand. The sale of fried fish takes
place in the evenings between 16hours and 19 hours.
This business generates Kshs 6,000 ($75) per day from the sale of fish and Kshs 3,600
($45) from the sale of food per day. This translates to Kshs 288,000 ($3,600) per month.
Assuming the cost of purchases and other overheads are 90% of this amount, the net
income is Kshs 28,800 ($360) per month or Kshs 960 ($ 12) per day. Running the
outdoor fish stand alone would generate a net income of Kshs 18,000 ($ 2,250) per month
56
57
The formation of peer group associations is discussed by De Soto, 2001 and is covered in chapter 2.
These employees are just on the borderline of the UN’s absolute poverty line of $ 1 per day.
122
or Kshs 600 ($ 7.5) per day. It was however observed that the business is not that rosy.
During the rainy season; March to May and October to November, this area gets quite
muddy when the black cotton earth road turns into a mud slurry, making it uncomfortable
for people to walk and therefore unlikely to come to the kiosk. This is why I have
deliberately used a 10% proportion for net income, in order to absorb the bad sales on
muddy/rainy days. Ordinarily the net income should be in the range of 20-25% of total
purchases and overheads. The risk of doing business during the rainy season means that
Adhiambo must maximise on sunny days by modifying her price regime. In any case as
in most economic transactions, where there is risk, there is a high rate of return (Syagga,
2002b: 37).
The foregoing figures indicate a lucrative business by Nairobi standards, and may not
qualify the proprietor as a low income earner. On this account, a previous study by Amis,
1994 revealed that a typical 10 room structure in an informal settlement gave an annual
rental return of 131%. Accordingly Amis concluded that;
It would seem quite possible that, as often suggested, unauthorised housing and
matatus are the most lucrative investments in urban Kenya (Quoted in Syagga,
2002b:9).
In terms of space, the kiosk occupies approximately 20m² and measures approximately
3mx7m. It is built of a timber framework with corrugated galvanised iron roofing sheets,
with sheet metal used for walling. While the outdoor fish stand relies on the shed of the
thorn tree for protection from the element of weather as can be seen in Fig.4.16. There
are no special architectural merits embedded in the design of the kiosk, however in the
context of the overall cluster of kiosks, an architectural collage is formed. This is because
each kiosk has its own design with the result that the overall composition may not be
harmonious as can be seen in Fig.4.17.
The kiosks however are kept to the periphery of the road reserve, leaving the motor car
carriageway free and uninterrupted. It is obvious that the motor car movement is
privileged over other forms of mobility including walking.58
58
See Samuels, I. et al. 2004: 174 for a discussion on the role of the car in residential areas.
123
Fig.4.14, Kiosks on Road Reserve (Centre of image)
Fig.4.15 Exterior and Interior, Alecky Food Kiosk
124
The design of kiosks is an issue in which the local authority can intervene by providing
standard type plans. In this regard Coca Cola bottling company has developed a standard
“coca cola” kiosk, which is distributed to vendors, this example shows that it is possible
to intervene with standardised kiosks at city level. However since the authorities consider
these informal business outlets as illegal, and officially do not exist, they do not make
any effort in intervening. For this reason people continue to build using whatever
materials they can get and at a price they can afford.59
Fig.4.16 Outdoor Fish Stand.
Fig.4.17 A collage of Kiosks
The lack of employment opportunities in the city which has led to informal trading is
manifested in the form of haphazardly distributed kiosks, some of which are licensed by
the city council while the majority trade without valid license. In fact Kiosks’
Allocation and haphazard hawking have no planning component, since no clear
policy exists within the council. Planning of these activities could provide
employment for a large number of people who earn their living from hawking
(Syagga, 2002:42).
Although there may appear to be no planning in these informalities, informal operators
make deliberate decisions in the choice of location, they often tend to concentrate in
areas with large pedestrian movements. These spatial preferences, is a lesson that the
formal planners and local authorities can learn from these informal entrepreneurs.
59
See chapter 3 – post-colonial Nairobi.
125
Hollywood Garage
“Hollywood Garage” a Jua Kali (Hot Sun) garage also operating at the entrance to Imara
Daima estate (see Fig. 4.18 and Fig.4.19), is another primary informality worth
examining. Nyange, the main mechanic at the garage, trained at the National Youth
Service (NYS). On qualifying from NYS, he was unable to join the formal labour market,
and therefore decided to venture into the informal (jua kali) sector.
Nyange and colleagues originally started operating inside the Imara Daima estate in
1996, but were moved to the external entrance area in 1998, when the estates’ residents
insisted that they did not want informal activities within the estate boundaries. Although
these informalities offer a source of livelihood to the not-so-poor urban residents, middle
income residents may not sanction their operations in their midst. This productive
informal sub-sector, often known as Jua Kali (hot sun), literally meaning working under
the sun, plays a significant role in the economy of Nairobi. It encompasses
manufacturing, repair and provision of services (Syagga, 2002:41), with this garage
offering motor vehicle repair services.
Fig.4.18 Garage shed
Fig.4.19 Clients’ Vehicles
The ¼ acre (0.1 Ha) land on which “Hollywood Garage” operates, was allocated by the
authority of the then 1998 Nairobi Provincial Commissioner, for the sum of Kshs. 10,000
($ 125), this money was paid to the area chief in consideration for the allocation. Here
again as Syagga posits;
126
the informal system of land and housing supply should be seen as a function of
political intermediation of varied but mutually reinforcing interests in urban land
and housing (Syagga, 2002b:18).
On top of the allocation fee, the garage pays the city council a Temporary Occupation
License (TOL) fee of Kshs. 7,200 ($ 90) per year plus a Trade License fee of Kshs. 5,200
($ 65) annually.
In terms of employment opportunities, the garage generates employment for 10
mechanics on a full time basis and 5 trainees on a part time basis. Every one of the ten
mechanics attends to their own clients, with the various trades of panel beating and spray
painting, mechanical and electrical repairs being dealt with separately. The garage opens
from 6.30hours to 18.30 hours (Monday to Saturday) and 6.30 hours to 13.00 hours on
Sundays. This shows that people in this sector of the economy must put in long working
hours in attempting to meet their financial obligations. On average, “Hollywood garage”
repairs about 3 cars per day during week days, with the number increasing to about 10
cars over the weekends. Charges for the repairs are negotiated on a case by case basis. In
an effort to increase the income from the plot, one corner of the plot has been sub-let to a
food kiosk which pays Kshs. 3,000 ($ 37.5) monthly rent. The owner of the kiosk who is
a resident in the adjacent middle income Villa Franca estate has made an illegal power
connection from his house to the kiosk. This shows how informalities straddle across the
socio-economic classes in Nairobi.
There are no infrastructural services provided on the site, making it necessary for the
garage staff and clients to use the sanitation facilities of “Home Pub” which is some
200m away. They however use one corner of the plot as a urinal. Water is sourced at the
nearby water vendor’s tap at Kshs. 3 ($ 0.0375) for a 20 litre jerrican Fig.4.20. The
garage currently does not have power connection, but it can be officially connected by
the Kenya Power and Lighting Company, if a connection fee of Kshs. 30,000 ($375) is
paid. All the costs involved in these informalities, show that it is not free to operate in the
informal as commonly perceived (De Soto, 2001).
Although Hollywood garage operates on a road reserve, and strictly speaking can be
classed as illegal, Nyange and his group do not perceive this business as illegal. In their
eyes the business is legitimate since it was sanctioned by the provincial administration,
127
and all the necessary trading licenses have been paid for. It is clear from this state of
affairs that the City Council is unable to manage the urban process, as the dual colonial
provincial/municipal control of urban resources has yet to be resolved.60
Fig.4.20, Informal water point
Mukuru Kwa Njenga Informal Settlement
It was mentioned earlier that the largest primary informality is manifested physically by
the dwelling units of informal settlements.61 One such settlement is Mukuru Kwa Njenga.
It is situated off Mombasa Road in the south east of Nairobi. Fig 4.21 shows an aerial
view of this settlement and its environs. Njenga was the first person to settle in this area
in the late 1970s, when he built a bar to cater for the needs of many low income workers,
particularly those who were engaged in quarrying activities at the nearby quarries. Before
this time, the area was hardly inhabited and had only become part of the city area after
60
61
See for example; Thornton White, et al. 1948; Burton, 2002.
See Table 3.
128
the 1963 extension of the city boundaries.62 Fig. 4.22 shows how this area has undergone
transformations from the 1970s to now.
Fig.4.21, Mukuru Kwa Njenga Settlement (Imara Daima at lower left of image)
62
See chapter3 – Post-colonial Nairobi
129
Mukuru Kwa Njenga 1978
Mukuru Kwa Njenga 1998
Mukuru Kwa Njenga 2003
Fig.4.22, Evolution of Mukuru Kwa Njenga (1978-2003)
In Mukuru Kwa Njenga settlement, named after Mr. Njenga the first settler in the area,
the dominant tenure system is the non-formal de facto tenure. This is a tenure system
which is insufficient to offer proper land ownership (Syagga, 2002:72). Typically the
dwelling units are primarily single rooms of approximately 12ft x 12 ft, a size similar to
130
rooms in other informal settlements (Hirst, 1994; Syagga, 2002). In this regards, Mwangi,
posits that;
90% of households in the informal settlements of Nairobi occupy single rooms of
between 9 and 14 square meters. The occupancy is 3-5 persons per room
(Mwangi, 1997).
Accommodation provided in informal settlements is mainly in single rooms measuring
approximately 10m² (12ft x 12ft). The differences however occur according to the
dwelling type and the types of construction materials used and the level of infrastructure
services available (NISCC, 1997; Syagga, 2002b). This particular model/module of
dwelling generation can be traced to the colonial bed-space concept that resulted in the
1921 bachelor quarters at Kariokor (Thornton White et al, 1948; Hirst, 1994)63
The occupancy of 3-5 people per room is tantamount to overcrowding, which in effect
gives a false impression of affordability and the high rents per room (Syagga, 2002b).
Players in the informal sector have such low incomes that they can not exercise choice
but take what is available. They thus have no freedom of entry or exit from the available
accommodation (Mugo, 2000 in Syagga, 2002b: 6).
Andimi exemplifies a typical tenant in Mukuru Kwa Njenga. When he first came to
Nairobi, he lived in the adjacent Quarry area between 1985 and 1989. He then moved to
Mukuru Kwa Njenga in 1990, and currently is living in his fourth rental room (house).
The changes in tenancies over the last 15 years are due to various reasons, ranging from
non-compliance with rent payment schedules to forced evictions.
At the time of the study, Andimi, occupied a 10ft x12ft room for which he paid a rent of
Kshs.400 ($ 5) per month, and bought water at the rate of Kshs.3 per 20 litre jerrican, a
price which rose to Kshs. 5 when there was scarcity. He used kerosene for cooking and
lighting was by way of a tin lamp (kuroboi). Fig 4.23 shows the plan and sections of this
particular dwelling unit on plot No. 646, while Fig. 4.24, 4.25 and 4.26 show some
images of the same unit and the surroundings. Andimi informed me that his
landlord/structure owner has no official ownership document, except that the landlord’s
name is in a register kept at the chief’s office, and also in another register kept at the
village chairman’s house. In order to be allocated a plot to build on, the structure owner
63
See chapter 3 – Consolidation period.
131
paid Kshs 5,000 ($ 62.5) to the area chief and the village chairman for each room built, in
this case a total of Kshs 20,000
($ 250) for the four rooms. I was also made to
understand that, in order to allocate the land, the two officials got authority from the area
Member of Parliament (MP).
10' - 0"
c.g.i. roof ing on timber
frame
8' - 6"
A
RM. 1
SECTION A - A
PLAN
RM. 3
7' - 0"
c.g.i. roof ing on timber
frame
RM. 1
cement screed on thin
slab 50mm thick.
SECTION B - B
10'-0"
RM. 1
3'-6"
10'-0"
B
RM. 3
12'-0"
24'-0"
12'-0"
B
cement screed on thin
slab 50mm thick.
8' - 6"
A
7' - 0"
12' - 0"
c.g.i. walling and roof ing
on timber frame
RM. 2
RM. 4
SCALE.
0
3'-4"
6'-8"
13'-4"
20'-0"
PLAN - ROOM CLUSTER
Fig 4.23, Typical Dwellings - Mukuru Kwa Njenga.
132
From a design point of view, there is little privacy in this settlement. Andimi enters
directly from the outside, into the communal corridor, which serves all the four
tenants/rooms. Each room/house serves as a multi-purpose space, akin to the 18th Century
European worker’s dwelling unit.64
There are no sanitary facilities on plot 646, residents in this plot use the group toilets (pit
latrines) located on an adjacent plot (Fig. 4.27). These latrines are operated privately and
commercially, where the residents pay Kshs.2 per visit. There are no bathing/shower
facilities, therefore most residents bathe inside their dwellings. In some informal
settlements, research has shown that up to 50 people use one pit latrine, while health
regulations require that one latrine and one bath/shower for each family or a group not
exceeding 6 persons (NACHU, 1990 in Syagga, 2002:52).
Fig.4.24 Entry Area, Andimi’s “House”
64
Fig.4.25 Interior, Andimi’s “House”
See Samuels, I. et al. 2004; Engels, F. 1993 (McLellan, D. ed).
133
Fig.4.26 Dwellings under Power Lines (Andimi’s House is in one of these).
There is also no regular collection of garbage in these settlements, resulting in huge heaps
of uncollected garbage, as the case of Mukuru Kwa Njenga Fig.4.28. In Nairobi, the
collection and disposal of refuse has been falling from 89.9% in 1978 to only 35% in
1988. By 1987, a few private firms were providing refuse removal services in affluent
areas of the city at a fee. The number of private providers increased during the 1990s and
by 1997, there were 60 small firms registered under the Companies Act collecting
garbage within the city (Syagga, 2002:53).
Fig.4.27 Commercial Pit Latrines
Fig.4.28 Garbage Heap
134
The water supply within the city is no better; only 11.7% of households have water
connections, in addition more than 55% of Nairobi’s population live in informal
settlements, where there are hardly any connections. Apart from limited access to water
sources, residents of informal settlements also experience water shortages including dry
taps. Most of the households therefore rely on community water points operated by
private entrepreneurs (Syagga, 2002:50). Infrastructural facilities are also minimal, for
example all the access roads/footpaths in the settlement were formed by continuous
pedestrian movement, which wore out the grass cover and formed earthen thoroughfares
as can be seen in Fig. 4.29. Moreover an inventory of Nairobi’s informal settlements
shows that;
Urban services in informal settlements are non existent or minimal. Roads,
pathways and drainage channels are made of earth and flooding is common
(Matrix Development Consultants, 1993 in Syagga, 2002:53).
Informal settlement areas do not have city or government health facilities. NGOs and
private individuals are the only health care agencies providing free and/or subsidised
services. Fig 4.30 shows a privately run health facility in Mukuru Kwa Njenga. This
conditions informal settlement dwellers to go to neighbouring higher income settlements
if they have to use government and city facilities (Syagga, 2002:54). The situation is no
different with regard to schools, there are no schools in Mukuru Kwa Njenga except one
run by the catholic mission and a private one recently opened in the newer part of the
settlement (Fig. 4.31). The nearby Embakasi Girls Secondary School was not meant to
serve this settlement, but the larger Embakasi area. In fact it is only in the last five years
that the settlement has engulfed this school.
135
Fig. 4.29, Unpaved Roads/Footpaths – Doubling as drainage Channels
Fig.4.30, Private Health Clinic.
Fig.4.31 Private School (So-called Academy)
136
Informal Settlements in General
Informal settlements accommodate 60% of the population in Nairobi on some 5% of the
residential land, as shown in Fig.4.32. Accordingly, it is not just that the settlements have
no infrastructural facilities, but that they are seriously overcrowded (Syagga, 2002b:28).
Informal housing based on the profit motive as a solution for shelter, is increasing in all
informal settlements in Nairobi. Informal rental housing is large scale in Kenya, unlike
the common view that it is the owner occupation which is dominant, the majority of slum
dwellers are tenants as exemplified by studies of Mathare, Korogocho, Kibera and other
settlements (Amis, 1984; Lee Smith, 1990; Gitau, 1999). For example, Lee Smith’s 1990
study, found that 87% of inhabitants in Korogocho were tenants (Syagga, 2002:92)
The haphazard nature of informal urbanisation eventually creates a haphazard urban
fabric. According to Syagga, 2002b any attempt to upgrade slums, must be based on
consensus among structure owners (absentee and resident) and tenants. The consensus
building must balance the incentives and investment potential of structure owners
and the basic needs and human rights of the very poor. Where as I agree with this
position, I need to reiterate the role the individual dwelling unit plays in the creation of an
urban environment. The design of the dwelling unit is normally ignored on the pretext
that infrastructural services i.e. roads, sewage, water and power supply are more
important by virtue of their superior investments. This leads to the propagation of the
barrack type of housing, similar to the 1920s colonial typology, which results in
monotonous neighbourhoods, such as Mathare 4A, Fig.4.33.
It is important that the spatial configuration and the dwelling unit design be given high
priority, because the entire neighbourhood to the walking man is characterised by the
streets and footpaths which are determined by the urban edge. This edge is defined by the
built forms, which must be designed accordingly in order to create the desired
neighbourhood urbanscape/morphology. Infrastructural services although important, have
very little impact on the urban morphology, and should therefore not be the sole
determinant in settlement upgrading.
137
Fig. 4.32, Location of Informal settlements. source: Matrix Dev. Consultants 1993
Fig.4.33, Mathare 4A Dwellings - Barrack Type
138
The costs of well designed dwelling typologies, whether privately or publicly sourced
will have little impact on the overall cost of the dwelling. The cost of each room as at
2000, was Kshs. 20,000 ($ 250) (Syagga, 2002b), this changes marginally as a result of
good design. Moreover, if the upgrading is done on a large scale, the costs of good design
will be absorbed by the large numbers due to economies of scale. There is also an added
disadvantage of horizontal upgrading, in that it increases urban sprawl, which further
stretches the limited infrastructural services. This can be reduced if vertical (multilayered) upgrading approaches are engaged.65
There are other players in primary informalities such as the roadside steel/timber
fabricators, who dot the Nairobi landscape; Fig. 4.34 shows a good example. The matatu
mode of transport can also be seen as being part of primary informalities. The lack of
planning for public transport in Nairobi resulted in the birth of Matatus, which was a
default solution for the transport system. Matatus operated without a legal framework
until the Traffic Amendment Act of 1984, which provided Matatus with a special form of
legislation (Syagga, 2002:54).66 Over the years, Matatus have operated in an ad hoc
manner, and even today they do not have proper termini, they park and continue to
operate in an ad hoc manner on the Nairobi Streets. However they are the most important
mode of transport for the majority of Nairobians, and for many Kenyans Fig. 4.35.
Fig.4.34, Roadside Furniture Vending
Fig.4.35, Matatu Transport
65
The three dimensional approach has been tried by Pamoja Trust in their Huruma Upgrading Project. See
chapter 3 – Planning, Regularisation and Upgrading.
66
See chapter 3 – Post-colonial Nairobi.
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Intermediate Informalities
Intermediate informalities are activities/processes which are settlement based and involve
mostly the construction of residences with a few commercial outlets; in general they have
secure land tenure, normally on leasehold for 99 years.67 The main players/actors in these
informalities are the middle income group although a few people from the high income
group also participate as absentee players. The main activity in this category being
building construction, has led to two scenarios; where the developments can either be
settlement formation or settlement modification. Quite often in settlement formation, the
proprietors have to build their own infrastructural facilities in addition to building the
houses; this is because the provision of most urban services may be minimal or non
existent. While in settlement modifications, the proprietors transform the existing spatial
configurations by way of alterations and extensions (transformations), thereby putting
additional pressure on the existing services. This later phenomenon is basically the
infiltration of the informal into the formal, creating a hybrid urban fabric or what
Soliman, 2002 referred to as ex-formal. This phenomenon where the informal infiltrates
the formal is discussed in detail in chapter five. Many fundis get employment in this
category of informalities, including unskilled persons, as nearly all the buildings/services
are built on labour contract basis. These activities have a multiplier effect as the
survivalist food vendors are drawn in to supply food to the construction workers.
The practice/urban process of settlement formation and transformation, takes advantage
of existing formal infrastructural services, similar to what primary informalities do.
However, intermediate informalities have a major impact on the urban built fabric, as it
generates a large variety of building types through the assertion of individuality in an
effort to create identity. The constructions quite often use approved standard building
materials like stone, concrete blocks, concrete tiles etc. In the process they create a
scenario which is not normally possible in a centralised settlement delivery process.68
Many constructions however, rarely have official council approval, and are therefore
statutorily illegal. In addition, the infrastructural services built on a self-help basis may
or may not be officially approved, although they can later on be taken over by the
67
68
See Table 3.
See the discussion on the issue of autonomy and heteronomy by Turner, 1976.
140
council. Such services will continue to raise doubt with regard to standards in terms of
design and construction.
Many proprietors in this category are moneyed, as they spend hundreds of thousands to
millions of Kenya shillings in carrying out their operations. They also pay statutory
payments including, land rates and rents, however the sums involved are quite low, as the
figures were probably set more than 30 years ago and have never been revised. On this
score, if the council were to charge appropriate land rents/rates, it could possibly raise
enough capital to fix the infrastructural services in the city. In cases where developers
create new settlements, they are unable to build paved roads, and therefore suffer the
consequences of inclement weather. They may also be cut off from their residences, if the
council were to change the road network, since officially their roads do not exist.69
From an economic perspective, operators in intermediate informalities, command some
respect in financial institutions, and can access formal funds using their title deeds as
collateral. In addition to this financial capability, they are able to have political freedom
as they can avoid the patronage syndrome that afflicts most urban poor. However their
numbers are not many enough to form a critical mass for the advancement of their
political agenda, and therefore remain on the political fringes, unless of course they, at
individual level, they are incorporated/join the circles of the political elite.
Intermediate informalities occur primarily due to the lack of affordable serviced land for
middle income residents of Nairobi. Developers in this category, generally acquire
unserviced land which they subdivide and build the infrastructural services on a self-help
basis. This category of informalities also includes formally planned middle income
residential areas which undergo transformations and eventually become informalised.
Over the years many middle income formally designed estates have become ex-formal,
due to this process, one of these ex-formal estates is discussed in detail in the next
chapter. A recent intermediate informality which presents an interesting case of
place making (settlement formation) is Jamhuri II estate. This estate is situated
approximately 5km from the city centre in the western part of Nairobi just off Ngong
Road.
69
See chapter 2 – Other debates on Informality.
141
Before discussing the transformations taking place in Jamhuri II, I briefly explain how
one gets to this estate from the CBD. From the CBD, you drive west along Haile Selassie
Avenue, which joins Ngong Road at the Nairobi Club. Driving along Ngong road you
pass Kenyatta National Hospital to the left then come to the City Mortuary roundabout.
You proceed straight on passed the Adams Arcade shopping centre and onto the
roundabout at the intersection of Elgeyo Marakwet and Suna roads. After negotiating the
roundabout approximately 300metres further on along Ngong Road, the Harlequins
Rugby Football Union plus Impala Club will be to your left. At this point and just before
the new Nakumatt Hyper Market to the right, and the Kenya Science Teacher’s College
to the left, you turn left into Kibera Station Road.
As you drive on, you pass the roadside tree nursery earlier discussed70 to the left, then the
road turns left as you enter Jamhuri I estate. But as you turn into Jamhuri I, you leave the
road leading straight to the Kibera railway station, with Jamhuri Park in the distance to
the right and beyond the railway line. You are now driving in a boulevard of mature
benjamina trees at the edge of Jamhuri I estate Fig.4.36, then suddenly, straight ahead of
you are several high rise blocks Fig.4.37. These are the commercial cum residential
developments at one edge of Jamhuri II estate, which have some shopping outlets. You
will in the meanwhile be seeing a fruit vendor to your right Fig.4.38, as you enter
Jamhuri II.
You are now in the estate and noticing a transformed environment, particularly if you
used to visit Kariuki’s off licence pub (masandukuni) that operated in the 1970s at the
Kibera station. At that time this area was just bush land with outcrops of some trees,
while the planting in Jamhuri II was hardly noticeable. I will now discuss how this estate
has come to be and the efforts individual residents are making in creating this new reality.
70
See Fig.4.3.
142
Fig.4.36 Boulevard - Jamhuri I
Fig.4.37 High-rise Blocks Jamhuri II
Fig.3.38 Fruit Vendor – Entrance to Jamhuri II
Jamhuri II was conceived as an extension to Jamhuri I estate, a tenant-purchase middle
income residential area built in the late 1960s. This idea of extending the Jamhuri
development was conceived by the Nairobi City Council in the early 1990s. The layout
and plot subdivision for Jamhuri II was done in house by the city council’s planning and
architecture department in 1992 as can be seen in Fig. 4.39. In this layout, apart from the
provision of some open spaces and a site for a nursery school, there is no provision for
any other social amenities. All the other land is divided into individual residential plots;
in fact the awkward configuration of the layout shows that there must have been many
interested parties in this land, with the resultant layout being a compromise solution.
After the subdivision had been approved, ideally the plots should have been advertised in
accordance to the Lands Act Cap280. This was never done, as the plots were internally
143
allotted to senior council officers and their cronies from both the public and private
sectors.
Fig.4.39 Jamhuri II – Plot Subdivision Layout
The Lands Act specifically provides that before public land is allocated, the
Commissioner of Lands should advertise that land and sell it at a public auction to the
highest bidder.71 This is not normally the case as Syagga, 2002 observed that;
Tragically, the very people charged with the duty of protecting public land are the
ones plundering Kenya’s heritage and resources (Syagga, 2002:66).
There is evidence to show that although many allottees from outside the council went
ahead and paid the necessary government levies in pursuit of title deeds, most council
allottees immediately sold their plots to third parties without incurring any costs, in other
words, they made free money. At that time (1993), the going price for the plots which
measure approximately 8m x 25m was about Kshs. 300,000 ($ 3,750).
71
The discussion on the procedure for the allocation of public land is articulated by Syagga, 2002.
144
The initial idea of developing Jamhuri II was to develop a middle income site-and-service
scheme, where the allottees would get serviced plots at a stipulated fee, then build their
houses individually. This never happened, and all the council did was to place the
subdivision beacons, leaving the plot owners with no option but to source the
infrastructural services on their own. Fig. 4.40 shows the time series images of Jamhuri
II, showing the morphological transformation of the settlement over time from an open
ground with some shrubs in 1970, to a dense urban development with unpaved roads
similar to those found in informal settlements.
Jamhuri II 1970
Jamhuri II 1978
Jamhuri II 1998
Jamhuri II 2003
Fig.4.40 Time Series Images – Jamhuri II
With regard to roads/footpaths, no communal efforts have been made for paving, and
they remain earthen. There is also no street lighting, but many people have lights on their
gates with additional security lighting on the buildings. Security in the estate is basically
ad-hoc, although a few courts have organised themselves and have built gates to their
cluster of houses. My key informant Mr. Kinuthia confirmed that in general the estate is
fairly safe, to the extent that some houses have no security at all. This is a typical case
where collective consumption goods can not be built on a self-help basis due the
145
individualism of plot owners, and the lack of a framework to articulate the collective
good.72
I now turn to the discussion on what efforts individuals are making in creating this new
reality in Jamhuri II. The development by Kinuthia on plot No. 69 will be used to
demonstrate how, many plot owners have gone about procuring their houses. Kinuthia
bought this plot in 1997, becoming the second owner from the initial allottee of 1993.
The initial allottee had made no improvements over the four year period, and had
basically held the land for speculation purposes. The plot which measures 8m x 22.5m
(0.018ha) was bought for Kshs. 750,000 ($ 9,375). Since there were no services on site
apart from the corner beacons, some basic services had to be installed before house
construction could begin. In order of priority water had to be connected to the site first,
this was done by paying the city council water department a sum of Kshs.15, 000
($187.5), in addition to the pipes for connection, which were bought by each individual
developer. For this particular case, the nearest water connection point was 15m away;
therefore the pipes didn’t cost much, since the length involved was small.
The next task was to connect electricity to the site; this was done by joining forces with
other three nearby plot owners, which helped reduce the overall costs. The nearest point
of tapping power was 30m away, which required two new poles to be erected to support
the supply cable. This exercise cost Kshs.25, 000 ($ 312.5) for each of the four plots.
Finally the sewer had to be connected to the plot; again 8 plot owners combined
resources to connect the sewer to the nearest point of connection which was about 30m
away. This cost each plot owner Kshs.30, 000 ($ 375). These costs are fairly reasonable
since the service distances involved are not too long. The pioneer plot owners to start
building however, paid much more as the service distances were much longer. Here again
a design and supervision fee was paid for the sewer connection.
Kinuthia who graduated from the University of Nairobi in the early 1990s, is one of the
many middle income Nairobians, who are unable to access formal housing. Although he
is willing and able to afford good quality housing, the market is not able to provide this
type of housing. These circumstances therefore force many middle income people to
resort to self-help based housing procurement methods.
72
In chapter 2, I discuss Castells concept of collective consumption goods, Susser, 2002.
146
This self-help approach to the procurement of housing and infrastructure services is a
reality most Nairobi middle income residents have to contend with on a daily basis. They
can however consider themselves better off; at least they are able to meet the costs of
these services. The poor who can’t pay for these services have no possibility of accessing
them. With regard to formalising the property, the plans for Kinuthia’s development on
plot No.69 were submitted to the council in the year 2000; to date they have never been
approved, meaning that for all practical purposes, Kinuthia’s property is illegal. Although
the extension of the sewer to every plot was the council’s pre-condition before approving
plans to any development in Jamhuri II, even after meeting this condition, no plans had
been approved for any of the developments taking place in this estate, as at April 2005.
The council has chosen to turn a blind eye to the goings on assuming that these are illegal
developments, yet on the one hand they are using officially sanctioned infrastructure
services.73
There are several legal requirements for development in this area, these include; a 6m
building set back from the road reserve, a 50% plot coverage and a 75% plot ratio.
Kinuthia’s development on plot No.69, has generally met these requirements, although
both coverage and plot ratio have been exceeded slightly. Figs. 4.41 - 4.43, show the
section and plans of this development.
The construction of this house started in August 2000 on a labour contract basis, and by
December 2003 the skeleton (shell) was complete. This is the time Kinuthia and family
moved in, and has since been working on the finishes, so far the construction had cost in
excess of Kshs 3,000,000 ($ 37,500) as at April 2005. These costs are not low by Kenyan
standards, making it clear that the residents in this estate can afford to pay for serviced
land. However due to the inability of the city council to deliver serviced land; they are
forced to use informal procurement methods. Once again, like primary informalities,
urbanisation occurring by default. Fig. 4.43 and 4.44 show some views of the Kinuthia
house.
73
This situation can be attributed to the ambivalence displayed by bureaucrats towards the phenomenon of
informality as discussed in chapter 2.
147
Fig. 4.41, Typical Section – Kinuthia House
Fig.4.42, Ground Floor Plan
The urban fabric generated by Jamhuri II is quite problematic. First of all it is common
knowledge that the current mayor of Nairobi and many senior council officers own plots
in this estate. Some of them have built flats in contravention of their own by-laws, which
148
require that each plot should be developed with one residential unit on not more than two
floors. This scenario, where basic rules are contravened by council officials, makes it
difficult if not impossible for other plot owners to follow the rules. Many plot owners
have therefore built flats on their plots, a condition which will definitely put more
pressure on the self-help infrastructural services, whose quality cannot be ascertained.
Fig.4.43, First Floor Plan
Fig.4.44 Entrance View
Fig.4.45, Stair Detail – Lit by skylight.
Fig. 4.46 and 4.47 show examples of some flats in Jamhuri II, with some rising to six
levels. Another by-law that has been grossly abused is the 6m building set back along the
149
access roads. Many plot owners have built up to the plot boundary, creating in some
cases coverage of up to 80%. From a design point of view, it is unlikely that the interior
spaces resulting from this kind of coverage will be adequately lit naturally, in addition to
restricting air movement particularly when the buildings have more than two floors. Fig.
4.48 illustrates how building to the plot boundary without a set back impacts on the street
sight lines. It is particularly dangerous for car drivers at junctions when set backs are
ignored.74
Fig.4.46, 3 Storey Flats
Fig.4.47, 6 Storey Developments
Fig.4.48, Urban Edge Definition – Lack of Building set-back
74
For the discussion of the facade as a place of conflict between the house and the city, see Samuels, I. et
al. 2004:56.
150
In terms of overall image of the estate, most people are struggling to generate
individuality visually as can be seen in Figs. 4.49 and 4.50.75 Where as this may be a
welcome endeavour, it tends to be overdone and ideally requires some control. This
control can only come from the city council, yet the same council is the culprit, making it
even more precarious. The mode of development in Jamhuri II is not sustainable, as it
does not take advantage of the economies of scale. It has buildings at various stages of
completion, from empty plots to fully built houses. Some empty plot owners practise
urban agriculture before commencing building construction Fig. 4.51, while others are at
the walling stage as others are at the roofing stage.
What is clear is that all these plot owners can afford high standard of housing, but end up
getting sub-standard housing, due to the ad hoc nature of construction. This can be
avoided if the city council could streamline its housing delivery procedures, if at all there
are any. For example, people are not willing to invest in the paving of the roads as these
do not affect them directly as they fall outside their plot boundaries. If the council were to
however, co-ordinate road construction and street lighting in the estate, many plot owners
may be willing to contribute financially. Fig. 4.52 shows the condition of one of the
access roads within the estate.
Fig. 4.49, Struggle for Identity
Fig.4.50, Visual Articulation
The key players in the realisation of Jamhuri II are the individual plot owners, the local
artisans (fundis), and the material suppliers. Nearly all the buildings are built on a labour
contract where the owner buys materials and the fundi builds and gets paid for his/her
labour. Generally all the other workers who assist the fundi are paid directly by the plot
75
See Turner, 1976 for the discussion on variety and subsidiarity.
151
owner on a daily or weekly basis. Where as this procurement process creates jobs for
many, it is not that efficient. The plot owner spends time purchasing materials when
she/he could be gainfully engaged elsewhere by letting more competent people deal with
construction. Many a times, plot owners have lost money through petty suppliers and
other intermediaries.
Fig.4.51, Urban Agriculture
Fig.4.52, Main Access Road
Like in primary informalities, female plot owners tend to loose more to these
intermediaries than their male counterparts. This basically is a result of lay plot owners
trying to tread on new territory of building construction.
Observation in Nairobi, shows that, in comparison to male structure owners,
women tend to spend more in developing there structures than male structure
owners. This is largely due to the trust they put on the males who assist them
during structure development. Once they have a rapport with such individuals
they do not scrutinise the cost of building materials, and what they are told the
provincial administration and/or KANU youth requires (by way of protection
money). This seems to be more serious for women who do not stay within
informal settlements and have to rely on provincial administration officers,
especially the chief and KANU youth wings (Syagga, 2002b:23).
As discussed in primary informalities, the urban edge definition is crucial in city making.
Here again, the urban edge will play a role in the definition the overall urban fabric. The
fact that many people are disregarding the 6m building set back generates a new urban
edge which poses new design/planning questions. May be the planners should in the first
place allow for no building set back, but make the road widths generous to be able to take
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the carriageway and the services that go with it. Making sure that proper sight lines can
be achieved at T junctions without the set backs. Evidence in Nairobi shows that people
are always tempted to create additional indoor space on any open ground, either for
family use or for subletting purposes. These are the realities on the ground and must be
addressed squarely.
Affluent Informalities
Affluent informalities are activities/processes that are settlement based with a focus on
residential development, and do not engage in commercial/business activities at all. They
have secure land tenure, either absolute or on leasehold for 99 years. These tenure
conditions oblige them to pay the relevant land rents and rates, which as discussed earlier
are rather low and need revising upwards. This category of informalities is dominated by
the high income group and is the least informal (most formal), and takes advantage of the
availability of well serviced land.
Basically, these informalities are based in areas zoned for low density, and therefore their
impact on the built fabric and infrastructural services is minimal. The construction of
additional space/residences will impact marginally on water and electricity supply, but
will have no impact on the sewage system. This is because most residences rely on
localised sewage treatment by way of septic tanks, located within each residential plot.
To operate in this category, one requires millions of Kenya shillings, as most proprietors
engage in conspicuous consumption, to the extent of even importing building materials.76
Like their intermediate counterparts, they also create jobs for local fundis and labourers,
and also generate a multiplier effect extending to the food vendors in the survivalist
category. In terms of built form, they evolve an eclectic architectural typology, as each
developer uses his/her own style, in an effort of stamping physically their individual
identities. Like the developments in intermediate informalities, the plans for
residences/transformations in this category may or may not have official council
approval. Therefore, if they have not been approved, it means they are illegal
developments.
76
See Table 3.
153
Unlike many low and middle income areas, the zones of affluent informalities are not
served with social amenities. One of the reasons for this situation could be that; the
council did not enforce their own laws, which require 20% of the land to be reserved for
social amenities. The developers therefore took advantage of this loophole and
subdivided all the land into residential plots. The result is that; the residents are thus
forced to travel long distances in order to access schools, shopping, recreation etc.
Luckily, these residents can afford these kinds of expenses, however on a city or national
level, it is an unnecessary drain on resources that could have otherwise been saved and
utilised for other pressing needs.
Politically, this group plays a major role in the governance of the city and country. This
group ideally replaced the colonial ruling class and as discussed earlier, enjoys an unfair
privileged position relative to other citizens. They are able to push their political agenda
with ease, and many people in this category enjoy political appointments to parastatals
and other national institutions.77
One of the residential areas experiencing this type of informality is Runda, situated
approximately 10km to the north of Nairobi CBD. Runda was originally a coffee farm,
and was part of the White Highlands at the turn of the last century. Most of these farms
were established as part of the process of transforming Africans to wage labourers which
began in 1902 (Emig and Ismail, 1980). Over the years, Runda has been transformed
from a coffee farm, to become one of the most affluent suburbs of Nairobi. Fig.4.53
shows aerial images of how this morphological transformation has taken place over the
last 30 years or so.
77
See chapter 3 – Post-colonial Nairobi.
154
Runda 1970- A Coffee Farm
Runda 2003 – High Income Suburb
Fig.4.53, Morphological Transformations of Runda
Due to the proximity of Runda to Nairobi, and the continued increase in urban
population, it was inevitable that nearby farmlands had eventually to be converted to
residential areas. This is what happened at Runda when the coffee owners, subdivided the
estate and sold the sub-divided parcels of land to interested companies for residential
development. The developers were either to fully built residences on individual plots or
to subdivide the parcels into serviced plots for sale on the open market, such that
individuals could build their own houses. According to planning requirements, the
subdivisions had to allow 20% of the land to be set aside for community and social
amenities. This was not observed, as most developers divided all their parcels into
residential plots. The Nairobi city council which was supposed to ensure that land is set
aside for social amenities did not take that responsibility. In this regard Syagga, 2002
notes that;
The councils have also neglected their role of guiding private developers,
resulting in these developers, developing housing without leaving land for
infrastructure and services (Syagga, 2002:60).
Fig 4.54 shows an example of one such subdivision, this particular parcel was bought by
National Housing Corporation and subdivided into ½ acre plots without setting aside any
land for infrastructure and other social amenities.
155
Fig.4.54, Typical Plot Subdivision – Runda (No provision for social amenities)
The development of Runda has basically been confined to residential development only,
without the requisite social amenities like; schools, shopping centres and open spaces that
make housing areas sustainable. Old Runda built in 1978 followed this pattern of
development, where complete built units were sold on the open market Fig. 4.55. The
result of this mode of development is that the residents crisscross the city on a daily basis;
taking children to and from school, going shopping or going for recreation.
156
Fig.4.55, Layout - Old Runda – (Aerial View 2003)
The building of the “Village Market” Fig. 4.56, in the 1990s in close proximity to Runda
has to some degree, shortened the distance covered for shopping and recreation. The
results of this is that “Village Market” gets quite congested with people from Runda and
other neighbourhoods like Wispers, Gigiri and Roselyn in addition to people from other
parts of the city. Figs 4.57, 58, 59 and 4.60 show images of “Village Market” which has
been dubbed as one of the leading global shopping centres.78
Apart from the informal land use pattern in Runda, many house owners have made
alterations and extensions (transformations) to their houses without seeking the council’s
approval, there by stretching the carrying capacity of infrastructural services. One such
example is the development on plot No.97 in old Runda. The extensions and alterations
made on this property almost double the size of the original development. Figs. 4.61-4.64
show the site plan, plans, sections and elevations of the transformed house. This
development contravenes the allowable plot ratio and coverage in this area and in the
process increases the residential density, and the accompanying loss of open space. With
regard to construction, the local fundi, like we saw earlier is a major player, as the
construction of these extensions and alterations were executed through a labour contract.
78
Village Market is basically a shopping centre for Nairobi’s affluent.
157
Fig.4.56, Village Market – Aerial View and Entrance Drive
Fig.4.57, Food Court
Fig.4.58, Water Fountain
Affluent informalities have little impact on the visual urban fabric, as the buildings
affected are set in large compounds, and can only be read at close proximity. One
peculiar observation is that affluent developers indulge in conspicuous consumption by
way of using very expensive building materials, often imported from abroad, particularly
Italy. This makes properties in Runda quite expensive, averaging Kshs 15,000,000 to
20,000,000 ($ 187,500-250,000). Currently ½ acre (0.2ha) of land in Runda costs
between Kshs 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 ($ 31,250-37,500).
158
Fig.4.59, Shopping Arcade
Fig.4.60, Main Entrance
Here again fundamental questions are raised; may be the densities set by the council are
too low for urban development in this area. Secondly, much as there is freedom of choice,
what impact does the importation of building materials have on the national economy?
These are important issues to be addressed, because local materials, sensitively used can
provide similar quality construction if not better. In addition, by increasing the densities,
areas like Runda can accommodate more people and therefore helping reduce urban
sprawl.
Fig.4.61, Aerial View
Site Plan - Plot 97
159
Fig.4.62, Ground Floor Plan – Plot 97
Fig.4.63, First Floor Plan – Plot 97
160
Fig.4.64, Sections and Elevations – Plot 97
161
5. INFORMALISING THE FORMAL
Introduction
In this chapter, lets’ turn to what I have called intermediate informalities in more detail,
with the main focus being on morphological transformations taking place in Buru Buru, a
settlement which was originally formal, but is gradually becoming informal or what
Soliman(2002) would call ex-formal.
I will use the Mumias South Road Corridor, which forms the central circulation spine in
Buru Buru housing estate, to illustrate this process of informalising the formal. The major
transformations in Buru Buru, take place along the circulation corridors, this therefore
justifies the choice of the Mumias South Corridor. The first development of phase one
and two of Buru Buru was designed without a building setback and buildings were built
up to the plot boundary Figs.5.1 and 5.2. Over the years, this interface between the public
and the private domains has undergone major morphological transformations.
Fig. 5.1, No setback - Phase 1
Fig.5.2, No setback - Phase 2
Unlike phase one and two, phase four and five had a 9m building setback/line within the
Mumias South Road corridor. It is within this setback/interface zone that major
transformations have taken place creating a completely new built fabric (Fig.5.3 and 5.4).
162
How these transformations occur and who are the actors in this urban process is what I
discuss in the rest of this chapter.
Fig.5.3, 9m Set-back Phase 4
Fig.5.4 Transformed 9m Set-back Phase 5
Evolution of Buru Buru
Buru Buru’s development can be traced back to the 1962 Regional Boundaries
Commission, which emphasised the inclusion, within the boundary of the city, adequate
land for future residential and commercial development (Hirst, 1994; Nevanlinna,
1996:204).79 In this regard the city boundary was extended to include a large extent of
farmland to the east previously known as Donholm Farm. Over the years the farmland
has been transformed into a vibrant residential area with more than 50,000 inhabitants
(Fig.5.5).
In addition to the above early provisions, the 1973 Metropolitan Growth Strategy (MGS)
further articulated the expansion of the city towards the east by proposing the
development of high density housing for the low and middle income groups in this area
(Emig and Ismail, 1980). During this period, the dominant global development paradigms
were the growth and redistribution theory and the basic needs theory.80 Based on these
theories, the developed world poured a lot of resources in the developing world, which
were aimed at improving productive and welfare conditions of the poor. Urban
development was geared towards facilitation and was project based (Syagga, 2002:1). It
is within the above context that Buru Buru was conceived and executed.
79
80
See the 1973 MGS.
Syagga, 2002.
163
One major reason for Buru Buru’s development was to increase the housing stock in the
city, in order to meet the ever increasing housing demand, in this case for middle income
residents. According to Syagga, 2002 by early 1970s the National Housing Corporation
was building an average of 2000 housing units per year, most of them in Nairobi, and
basically tenant purchase and rental houses. This policy of building rental and tenant
purchase schemes proved to be unsustainable, as the production process hardly catered
for more than 10% of the required housing for Nairobi.81 This experience gained from the
tenant purchase/rental housing led to the policy of mortgage housing, which became the
underpinning policy in the development of Buru Buru. In this policy, people were given
mortgage facility, to be amortised over a period of 15 to 25 years depending on their age
and affordability level.82
Buru Buru housing development was a joint venture of the Nairobi City Council, the
Kenya Government and the Commonwealth Development Corporation (formerly
Colonial Development Corporation). The policy of mortgage housing assumes that the
purchaser/buyer has a regular income so that he/she can service the mortgage regularly
on a monthly basis. In order to satisfy these policy assumptions, the selection process for
potential house owners ensured that there would be minimal risk in owners defaulting on
mortgage repayments. This process in the end favoured employees in the formal public
and private sectors, and excluded those in the informal sector.83
The hiring of project consultants was the first step to be taken in the project
implementation process. The firm; Colin Buchanan and Partners (UK), a foreign firm,
was commissioned as the project consultants.84 After commissioning the consultants, the
next step in the implementation process was for the project team to design the Buru Buru
residential area in terms of ; overall layout, infrastructural services and individual
dwelling units. The design, at the very beginning was conceived as phased development
81
Turner, 1976 has argued against treating the housing issue in terms of deficits in numbers to some
material standard. He prefers to address the value of housing to people rather than what housing is. See
chapter 2.
82
Housing in this case has been treated as a commodity. See for example; Harvey, 1986; Lefebvre, 1979.
83
Informal sector employees were excluded because they generally do not have regular incomes and were
therefore potentially risky.
84
Other cities like; Zanzibar, Lusaka, Lilongwe, Dodoma etc. had similar approaches to urban development
during the post-colonial period. See Myers, 200: 159.
164
with each phase having approximately 1,000 houses, so that eventually five phases would
yield 5,000 houses, housing about 50,000 people as per the project brief.
Buru Buru 1970
Buru Buru 1978
Buru Buru 1998
Buru Buru 2003
Fig.5.5, Transformations of Buru Buru – (1970-2003)
Buru Buru located some 7km east of the Central Business District (CBD), and lying
between Rabai Road and Outer Ring Road, was designed as a middle income residential
area on the basis of Western standards. This was because, in newly independent Kenya,
according to Richard Stren, housing plans and projects received much national publicity,
and on the symbolic level, modern forms were considered appealing. Within this context,
modern dwellings for African families were seen as visible evidence of the progress from
a colonial society to a modern African State. “By living in more modern structures, it is
implied that Africans are themselves more modern” (Stren, 1972).
165
The basis of designing Buru Buru, for the middle income class and to Western standards
can also be explained on the basis of Nevanlinna’s study, where she observed that;
In Western analyses of newly independent African countries, the middle classes
were perceived not only as insurance for continuity, but also as the real motors of
development and modernisation. In creating a middle class in Kenya, housing was
seen as one of the key elements, particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s. Public
housing programmes and development aid policies favoured middle income
groups. The notion of dwellings as a vehicle in the creation of a middle class also
involved the planning and design of the dwellings (Nevanlinna, 1996:306).
Unlike many projects, where potential home owners are consulted for their views on
dwelling preferences, no attempt was made to try and get these preferences in the case of
Buru Buru. Rather the consultants generated several type plans, starting with a 3-room
single storey house to a 5-room double storey house. These proposals were not subjected
to any critical debate in terms of their appropriateness as solutions for the housing needs
for the emerging African middle class. The impact of this decision can now be felt, and
is one of the reasons why many Buru Buru residents are now transforming their
houses.
Colin Buchanan and Partners were responsible for the design of Buru Buru phase one and
two, while phases three, four and part of phase five were designed by Mutiso Menezes
International, a local firm. The other part of phase five was designed by Paviz Agepour,
another firm practicing in Nairobi. These two later firms continued the trend set by Colin
Buchanan and Partners, of developing different type plans, without consulting the
potential owners, even when this was possible. Phase one of the developments was
completed and occupied between 1973 and 1974, while phase two was completed in
1975. The other phases were completed in 1978, 80 and 83 respectively for phases three,
four and five. Buru Buru phase five extensions, built near phase one, and also designed
by Mutiso Menezes International was added in 1984.
In terms of financing, the Buru Buru scheme was conceived as a mortgage housing
scheme, targeting the middle income group as high income groups could fend for
themselves without state intervention. Emphasis was laid on individual private home
ownership, and therefore individual title ownership. The scheme was tied to a 15 to 20
166
year mortgage, under which the title to each lot was held by the financier/developer, until
the mortgage was fully amortised. This individuality, led to the individual lot/plot being
the main design/layout generator as can be seen in Fig.5.6, where the lot/plot dominates
the whole.85
The plot sizes in Buru Buru are generally 6m x (20-24) m, which allows for a staggered
layout that creates internal courtyards. However, the corner plots and those along road
reserves tend to be much larger due to the 6-9m building lines stipulated by the building
by-laws. The plot sizes are in the ratio of 1:3.3-4, which falls within the efficient ratio of
1:3-4 for optimum service utilisation as developed by Caminos and Geothert, 1978.
In Buru Buru, the lot or individual dwelling unit became the generator of the entire
neighbourhood. The idea of the individual dwelling unit, acting as the generator of the
entire residential area has been addressed by Aldo Rossi, 1982 who posited that the city
has always been characterised largely by the individual dwelling.
The emphasis on the lot can also be traced to the colonial spatial strategies for enframing
order as articulated by Timothy Mitchell. Here the idea was to create a fixed distinction
between the inside and outside in domestic architecture and urban design, thereby
codifying neighbourhood, family and gender relations in a manner distinct from African
systems of domestic order (Mitchell, 1988).
85
By the early 1970s, the emerging African middle class had been partially alienated from traditional rural
practices, and was gradually getting assimilated into the Western Capitalist Economy. See chapter 2.
167
R A
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BURU BURU NURSERY
SCHOOL
( i )- THE INDIVIDUAL LOT DOMINATES THE WHOLE
( ii )- URBAN EDGE DEFINED BY HEDGE / BUILDING
SET BACK
JOG
OO
RO
AD
150m
300m
LIN
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Fig. 5.6, Mumias South Corridor – Partial Layout
168
B U R U B U R U P O LI C E
STAT I O N
Planning and Development Control Measures
Master Planning was the main tool used in the development control of urban areas. As
was shown in post colonial Nairobi (chapter 3), all the development control measures for
Nairobi and its urban process used the Master Plan. Zoning, density control, height
restrictions etc., are used within the Master Plan to parcel certain sections of the city for
certain functions.
The Master Plan for Buru Buru allowed for a commercial zone to the west of Mumias
South Road from phase one to five. This was very similar to the 1948 neighbourhood
planning concept articulated by Thornton White et al, who observed that;
it is desirable that so far as practicable, there should be an “open space” in the
centre of each unit, to be used partly as a recreation space and partly as a reserve
for sites for public or semi-public buildings, such as nursery or junior schools,
clinics, libraries, clubs etc (Thornton White et al, 1948:64).
This central spine was hardly developed, and has been subjected to unprocedural
allocations through patronage and clientelism thereby exacerbating informality.86
The specific development control measures that were laid down for Buru Buru included;
a density of 32 plots per hectare or 260 persons per hectare, a plot ratio of 75% and plot
coverage of 35%. The requirement for car parking was one car per plot and half a car
park off plot; houses were to be developed on ground and first floor only. The
commercial plots at the shopping centre were zoned for a plot ratio of 200% and ground
coverage of 80%; they were also to be built on only two floors. In recent times however,
due to the pressure being exerted by alterations, the council has revised the ground
coverage for residential plots to 50%, while the plot ratio remains at 75% (discussion
with Mr. Mbithi of NCC, 26.08.03). It was also confirmed that no approval has been
granted for any double storey extensions, any development beyond ground floor is
therefore illegal.
It was also envisaged that; there should be no direct access to Mumias South Road; all
lots were to be accessed from within the courtyards. Here. Mitchell’s enframing strategy
of containerisation and notions of inside/outside came into play, with the Mumias South
Road being the outside and the courtyards the inside. This is similar to the 1948 proposal,
86
See Syagga, 2002 for the discussion on land allocation.
169
where Nairobi was divided into some fifty neighbourhood units, which were to be
enclosed with a distribution road system (Thornton White et al, 1948).87
Urban Edge Definition
The development of Buru Buru housing with a central spine road (the Mumias South
Road) presented an opportunity of creating a distinct urbanity in this part of Nairobi. This
is because an urban edge is in general defined by the boundary between private space and
public space, and depending on how it is articulated; it produces the visual urban images
to the walking/driving man.88 Ildefons Cerda` (1855-63), defined the urban edge quite
successfully with his Barcelona extension (Eixample) project. In the case of Buru Buru,
the building of phase one and two did not allow for a building set back along the central
spine road, and the Colin Buchanan and Partners type plans developed for the edge
condition, rather than articulate the edge turned their back to it. They occasionally
allowed some small windows along the edge, but otherwise the treatment was that of a
clear separation of inside and outside Fig.5.7. This further solidified the boundaries
between the inside and the outside at the domestic and neighbourhood levels, enhancing
containerisation as Mitchell would put it.
The general organising principle for the whole housing scheme was to create introverted
courtyards from which all houses were to be accessed. These courtyards were
interconnected by footpaths allowing the free movement of people; they were also linked
to the central spine by footpaths. Over the years, for security reasons and control, these
courtyards have gradually been closed off using turnpikes or gates, creating some kind of
gated community arrangements.89 The walk through thoroughfares that linked the courts
to the central spine, have also been sealed off, now courtyards have only one entry/exit
point.
The design for phase four and five allowed for a 9m building line/set back along this
central spine, this created some challenges in terms of urban edge definition. The
designers chose to use a simple wooden fence in defining this edge. Over the years, this
87
This proposal for 50 neighbourhoods was never realised, as no funds were made available for its
realisation. Alternatively, the plan could have been a public relations exercise, without any intensions of
actualising it.
88
Samuels, I. et al. 2004 discusses this phenomenon as the interface between the house and the city.
89
See Harvey, 1986 and 2000.
170
edge has been the scene for major morphological transformations, thereby completely
changing the streetscape/urban morphology of phase four and five in the last 5-10 years.
Several building typologies have emerged (Fig.5.8, 5.9 and 5.10), which can broadly be
grouped into three categories; commercial, residential and commercial cum residential.
The residential type is either used by the extended family or is sublet, while the
commercial cum residential is often the type where small enterprises are established on
the ground floor with the upper floor being let out as a residential unit. The cases
depicting commercial usage only, are actually a complete change of user from residential
to commercial e.g. Millennium Dental Clinic and Sunflower Drycleaners, discussed in
detail later in this chapter.
Fig.5.7, Urban Edge Definition 2 – Phase 1
171
Fig.5.8, Commercial Transformation
Fig.5.9, Residential Transformation
Because of the uncoordinated nature of these transformations, it is difficult to predict
what kind of urban edge will result, as they take place on an individual basis depending
on the ability and preferences of the plot owner. It would have made a better visual
impact had this edge been defined at the design stage i.e. building up to the plot boundary
and leaving enough road reserve for infrastructural services. It seems prudent to suggest
that options in design typologies should have allowed for small enterprises to evolve
along the corridor, making it more inclusive and commercial in outlook.
Fig.5.10, Commercial cum Residential Transformations
172
It would have been possible to design the dwelling such that small enterprises could open
directly to the street on two levels, with a possibility of lettable rooms on the third level.
This would then fix the urban edge condition, which would reduce the possibilities of
future modifications. The main dwelling at the rear could also be designed for phased
development, building a few initial rooms, and allowing room for future extensions
Fig.5.11. By articulating the urban edge and creating possibilities for morphological
transformations to happen, amore harmonious urban fabric would have been the likely
result.90
For example Cerda’s urban block in the Barcelona extension, has undergone morphological
transformations for more than 140 years, but still retains its historical aesthetics/character.
90
173
Fig.5.11, Urban Edge Definition 3
174
Informalising the Formal
Mumias South road is the main circulation spine through the Buru Buru housing
development, which forms a major motorised communication corridor. It was meant to
have commercial facilities and community amenities along it. However, during the
implementation stage, only a few shops and one restaurant were built, while the provision
for other amenities such as cultural centres, markets, library etc., were never realised.
This omission facilitated the ad-hoc development process taking place along this
corridor; it also has enabled the clientelism and manipulation by the power elite in the
subdivision and allocation of commercial plots. The character of the corridor has changed
drastically in the last 5-10 years due to the morphological transformations that have taken
place. New hybrid urbanity is therefore emerging, where three basic urban types can be
identified; commercial, residential and commercial cum residential.
There are approximately 250 plots adjoining the Mumias South Road, between Rabai
road and Buru Buru police station a distance approximately 2km long Fig.5.6. Some of
the plots which were large and meant to be reserved for social facilities/amenities are
now subjected to further subdivision including change of user for some open spaces.
More than 50% of all properties (buildings) in this corridor have undergone some
morphological transformation. The majority of these transformations have resulted in
small business outlets; hair salons, cyber cafes, wines and spirits, butcheries, fast foods,
clinics etc., plus of course residential extensions. What is also characteristic about this
process is that there is an intensity of built form transformation at road junctions within
the corridor Fig.5.12
Fig. 5.12, Layout – Cluster A
175
30M WIDE MUMIAS SOUTH ROAD
285
195
286
box c pbd.
287
194
sto
196
284
living
194
kitchen
wc
bedrm. 1
dining
197
18M ROAD
283
198
199
kitchen
box c pbd.
bedrm. 1
wc
281
COURT
sto
living
dining
282
200
280
COURT
dining
kitchen
living
279
hall
201
wc
bedrm. 1
shw.
bedrm. 3
bedrm. 2
202
AS DESIGNED ( 1975 )
30M WIDE MUMIAS SOUTH ROAD
285
195
286
box c pbd.
287
194
p/copy
kitchen
284
196
cyber cafe
wc
living
dining
197
18M ROAD
283
wc
kitchen
box c pbd.
bedrm. 1
199
sto
living
dining
281
198
up
282
COURT
194
cyber cafe
sto
wc
bedrm. 1
200
280
COURT
sh / wc
dining
kitchen
living
room
279
hall
wc
shw.
201
bedrm. 1
lawn
bedrm. 3
bedrm. 2
202
AS BUILT ( 2004 )
SCALE.
0
10m
20m
40m
Fig.5.12b, Phase 4 Junction - Cluster A Layout
176
Commercial Transformations
These are transformations where the premises either partially or wholly changes use, as
can be seen in the transformations on plots 2/496, 2/858 and 4/174, represented by
Figs.5.13, 5.14 and 5.15 respectively. The transformations on plot 2/496 have left the
original residential house intact, by the building of a new structure fronting the Mumias
South Road. The new structure has six lettable rooms on ground and first floors, with the
first floor rooms opening onto a balcony that cantilevers to the street Fig.5.16. The
materials used in building the new structure are similar to those of the original
construction, so it tends to blend into the context; however, it creates a new street
character by orienting towards the street and breaking away from the original
containerisation principle of inside/outside.91
The position of the new construction is about 1m away from the original house, which
compromises the lighting conditions to two of the rooms on the original house i.e.
bedrooms 2 and 4, and the rental rooms in the new structure Fig.5.13. The new structure
obviously impacts on the carrying capacity of the sewer, water and power supply.
Another feature of the new construction is the use of the A-frame as opposed to the lean
to hollow pot roof construction originally used. Many local artisans (fundis) are not
familiar with hollow pot construction, and therefore opt for the more common timber
A-frame construction. Even if they were to be knowledgeable on hollow pot maxi-span
construction, it would be uneconomical to build only one unit using this system.
Four of the rooms in the new structure are let out as; grocery shop, beauty shop, barber
shop and hair saloon, with the remaining two rooms being let out as rental rooms. These
small businesses create jobs for some 8 people and generate a monthly rental income of
about Kshs 25,000 ($ 312.5) for the landlady. Assuming the new structure cost Kshs
1,200,000 ($ 15,000) to build, the payback period at the above rental income is about 48
months, which is a short enough period to justify the investment, as average pay back
period for such investments is normally in excess of 120 months.
91
For a discussion on the notion of containerisation, see Mitchell, 1991.
177
bedrm. 2
bedrm. 1
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
bedrm. 4
living rm.
A
A
SECTION A - A
A
TIMBER FENCE
bedrm. 3
dining
1 8 M.
R O AD
RESERVE
bedrm. 1
living
bath
kitchen
wc
bedrm. 4
A
bedrm. 2
A
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
A
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1975 )
30 M.
MUMIAS SOUTH R O A D
USE OF A - FRAME AS OPPOSED
TO LEAN TO HOLLOW POT
CONSTRUCTION
STONE WALL FENCE
balc.
salon
office
shop
shop
STONE WALL FENCE
MUMIAS SOUTH
ROAD
ELEVATION 01
A
A
SECTION A - A
STONE WALL FENCE
1 8 M.
R O AD
RESERVE
up
WC/
SH
WC/
SH
RENTAL
RM
BEAUTY
SHOP
BARBER
SHOP
SHOP
RENTAL
RM
SALON
HSE. NO. 495
( i ) USE OF A- FRAME ROOF ON EXTENSIONS.
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
A
A
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
SCALE.
0
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
30 M.
4.5m
9m
18m
MUMIAS SOUTH R O A D
Fig.5.13, Transformations on 2/496
178
The transformations on plot 2/858, are a complete change of use from residential to drycleaning, a semi-industrial activity. The resultant layout of this transformation is not
sensitive to fundamental design issues. First of all, the new toilet and office next to the
laundry machine have their windows opening directly to the adjacent plot, which is not
acceptable. Secondly, nearly all the internal rooms i.e. store, yard/store and meeting room
have no natural lighting, and have to rely on the unpredictable artificial lighting Fig.5.14.
The resultant built form creates plot coverage of about 75% and a similar plot ratio, well
above the allowable design ratio of 35%. The extensions also use alternative materials i.e.
corrugated galvanised iron (cgi) roofing sheets as opposed to clay tiles and timber
walling as opposed to masonry thereby creating a visual conflict. Another peculiar
development on this property is the annexing of the 3m public passage (a practice
commonly referred to as land grabbing), for private use.92 It is a known fact that nearly
all the public passages to the spine road have been closed for security reasons, but this
should not be license for some individuals to annex these passages for private use.
This type of transformation (semi-industrial) puts a lot of pressure on infrastructural
services, particularly water and power supply. This pressure according to the proprietor,
forced him to install a three phase power supply system to be able to cope with the power
demand of this semi-industrial enterprise. Although the water supply to this enterprise
was said to be stable, the monthly payments showed that the consumption was quite high.
The payments were Kshs 30,000 ($ 375) for electricity and Kshs 9,000 ($ 112.5) for
water. These are more than the payments average domestic consumers make of
Kshs 2,000 ($ 25) and Kshs 1,500 ($ 18.75) for electricity and water respectively. The
costs involved in carrying out this business are also not small; they include a monthly
rent of Kshs 19,000 ($ 237.5), a monthly wage bill of approximately Kshs 40.000 ($
500), annual city council license fee of Kshs 15,000 ($ 187.5), plus Kshs 10,000 ($ 125)
per month for security guards.
The landlady/tenant relationship is not on a contract basis as the original five year lease
lapsed in 1998. Currently they are operating on an informal basis (gentleman’s
agreement). A case in point is that; recently (2001), the landlady allowed the tenant to
construct the timber extension at a cost of Kshs 30,000 ($ 375). The enlarged business
92
See Syagga, 2002.
179
premise creates employment for 11 people, jobs which the formal sector would otherwise
not have created.
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
3.0 M PASSAGE
30.0M MUMIAS SOUTH ROAD
COURT
SECTION A - A
B
SECTIONAL ELEVATION 01
6.5M SET BACK
TIMBER FENCE
kitch.
back yard
TIMBER FENCE
living rm.
wc
sh
COURT
30.0M
bedrm. 2
bedrm. 1
parking
A
gate
MUM
IA S S
H RO
OUT
A
3.0 M PASSAGE
AD
B
FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSTRUCTION ( 1975 )
G.C.I. ROOFING
SHEETS
G.C.I. ROOFING
SHEETS
STONE WALL FENCE
AND METAL GATE
30.0M MUMIAS SOUTH ROAD
drying/
storage
storage
storage
COURT
SECTION A - A
B
SECTIONAL ELEVATION 01
laundry
machine
wc off.
store
yard/sto.
storage meeting
rm.
wc
office
washing/drying
machine rm.
30.0M
MUM
reception
display
IA S S
pressing
rm.
storage
car park
A
( i ) USE OF ALTERNATIVE MATERIALS ON
EXTENSIONS.
H RO
OUT
( ii ) OPENING WINDOWS TO PRIVATE PROPERTY
drying / storage
A
B
AD
( iii ) ANNEXING 3.0M PUBLIC PASSAGE FOR
PRIVATE USE.
FLOOR PLAN
SCALE.
0
3m
6m
9m
15m
TRANSFORMED CONSTRUCTION ( 2004 )
Fig.5.14, Transformations on 2/858
180
sh / wc
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
dining
6.0 M ROAD
6.0 M ROAD
A
SECTION A - A
30
M.
R O
H
UT
SO
S
A
MI
MU
A
A
ELEVATION 01
A
D
RVE
RESE
ROAD
kitchen
sto
wc
bedrm. 3
hwc
bedrm. 1
01
box c pbd.
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
living
dining
bedrm. 2
yard
sh/wc
GATE
BUILDING
LINE
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1978 )
A
A
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
sh / wc
MASONRY COLUMNS AND
STONE WALL FENCE
MASONRY COLUMNS AND
STONE WALL FENCE
6.0 M ROAD
dining
6.0 M ROAD
SECTION A - A
30
M.
A
MI
MU
S
U
SO
TH
R O
A
A
ELEVATION 01
D
A
E
SERV
RE
ROAD
STONE WALL
FENCE
MASONRY COLUMNS AND
STONE WALL FENCE
GARDEN
RECEPTION
PARKING
REG.
OFFICE
01
WC
WAITING
TREATMENT
OFFICE
roof over
car port
OFFICE
TREATMENT
COMPRESSOR
GATE
A
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
WC/
SH.
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
A
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
OFFICE
SCALE.
0
4.5m
9m
18m
Fig.5.15, Transformations on 4/174
181
The above laundry business also indicates that people are willing and able to invest large
sums of money informally due to the prevailing socio-economic circumstances. The
architectural character resulting from these transformations is however doubtful, as there
is a clash of building material usage, and many rooms having to rely on artificial lighting.
As discussed earlier, here again is a situation where a flexible initial design would have
allowed for more appropriate morphological transformations to occur (See, Fig.5.11).
Although the annexing of the adjacent passage way seems to improve the security in the
area, it needs to be regularised. Figs.5.17, 5.18 and 5.19 show some images of these
transformations on plot 2/858.
Fig.5.16, Balcony on 2/496
The other significant commercial transformation in the corridor is the Millennium Clinic
on plot 4/174. This commercial enterprise is a dental clinic, which caused the previous
residential quarter to be converted into a health facility Fig.5.15h. The whole ground
floor of the original house has been transformed to suit dental operations including the
addition of a new waiting area. The upper floor has remained more or less the same
182
except for the addition of an office space on top of the original kitchen and toilet below.
The use of building materials and the general architectural language is similar to the
original construction, thereby making the new blend into the original context.
Fig.5.17, Drying Area 2/858
Fig.5.18, Annexed Passage Adjacent to2/858
Fig.5.19, Entrance - Drycleaners 2/858
Plot 4/174 is one of the larger corner plots measuring approximately 360m² and where a
6m building line was allowed from the spine road. The transformations from a house to a
clinic resulted in increasing the plot coverage, however, even with this increase; the
coverage is still less than 30%, although the allowable coverage is 35%. This is another
183
condition where the by-laws have to be re-looked at. There is no need of having these
large individual corner plots due to building lines and set backs yet the road reserves are
quite generous. In the last 25 years since Buru Buru phase four was completed, nothing
much has happened within these large road reserves, and nothing is likely to happen in
the foreseeable future. It would therefore make economic and design sense by
rationalising the urban edge condition by for example having a zero building line.
This would increase the number of houses per hectare, and also create an
opportunity to properly define the urban edge by the building mass.
The original timber urban edge definition was changed to a stone wall construction and at
the same time the outside/inside divide was violated by creating a pedestrian entrance
directly from the Mumias South Road. The well kept planting along the road, conceals
the harsh/greyness of the boundary wall. Figs.5.20, 5.21, 5.22 and 5.23 show some
images of this clinic. The Millennium Clinic, apart from increasing the power
consumption slightly, pretty much functions as the average residential house, and
therefore puts little pressure on the infrastructural facilities.
Fig.5.20, Clinic Access 4/174
Fig.5.22, Entrance Area 4/174
Fig.5.21, Dental Room 4/174
Fig.5.23, Reception 4/174
184
Residential Transformations
Residential transformations have taken place mainly due to family dynamics, and can
either be entirely driven by the extended family requirements or by economic demands.
Either way the transformations impact on the urban fabric both visually and by putting
additional pressure on urban infrastructural services. The transformations on plot 4/201
are an example of those being driven by the extended family requirements, and where
cultural practices demand that adult sons do not share the same roof with their fathers
(discussion with owner, 01.01.04).
The owner, who has lived in this house since 1981, is father to two adult daughters and
one adult son. The need to house the adult son in a separate dwelling is the main reason
behind the transformation. Fig.5.24 shows how the extensions have been realised, with a
new private family yard and a lawn to the rear resulting from the transformation. The
containerisation syndrome as articulated by Mitchell, 1991 is also ignored by the creation
of a new access directly from the external distributor road Fig.5.27. This allows the adult
son to access his self-contained room, freely without disturbing people in the main house.
For acoustic and visual privacy, the extension is detached and has a separate roof from
the main house’s (father’s) roof. In the event that the adult son migrates, the selfcontained room can be sublet to an outsider. Figs.5.25, 5.26 and 5.27 show some images
of this transformation.
The original house had a plot coverage of 30%, which was just below the allowable
coverage of 35%, while the coverage after the transformation is now 37%. In addition to
the increased density, the new extension will of course put pressure on the water;
sanitation and power supply systems, even though these services are now adequately
catered for. The resultant architectural character is simple and well controlled; however,
concrete roofing tiles are used instead of the original clay tiles. The use of a timber roof
construction also contrasts the maxi-span system originally used. This can be attributed to
the technological limitations of the local artisans (fundis) and the economies of scale
involved in building a small 20m² extension.
Like other transformations in the corridor, the plans for this extension have not been
approved by the council. This extension including minor alterations to the main house
was built on a labour contract at the cost of approximately Kshs 500,000 ($ 6,250).
185
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
hall
sh/wc
bedrm.
6.0 M ROAD
COURT
SECTIONAL ELEVATION Y - Y
Y
ROAD
6.5M SET BACK
TIMBER FENCE
dining
WIDE
kitchen
hall
wc
bedrm. 1
shw.
15 . 0 M
Y
TIMBER FENCE
living
GATE
bedrm. 3
bedrm. 2
dustbin
cubicle
FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSTRUCTION ( 1980 )
MAREBA ROOF TILES
ON TIMBER RAFTERS
STONE WALL FENCE
PURPOSE MADE GLAZED
STEEL CASEMENT WINDOWS
pv
pv
sh/wc
hall
bedrm.
COURT
6.0 M ROAD
SECTIONAL ELEVATION Y - Y
shop
shop
wd
room
sh /
wc
STONE
WALL
pv
yard
pv
pv
pv
p.c.c paviours
Y
lawn
15 . 0 M
WIDE
ROAD
Y
GATE
STONE WALL
dustbin
cubicle
FLOOR PLAN
TRANSFORMED CONSTRUCTION ( 2004 ) SCALE.
0
3m
6m
9m
15m
Fig.5.24, Transformations on 4/201
186
At the time of the study (January, 2004), the 20 year mortgage had been fully amortised,
and the only payments being made by the owner, were the annual land rate of Kshs 5,000
($ 62.5) and land rent of Kshs 1,000 ($ 12.5). On top of these payments each household
pays a monthly sum of Kshs 400 ($ 5) for watchmen (Askaris) who provide a 24 hour
private security service plus Kshs 150 ($ 1.875) for private refuse disposal. This example
shows a clear case where traditional civic responsibilities have been privatised, the
question then to be posed here is; what are the land rents and rates being paid for? May
be these rates are too low to have any impact in enhancing the council’s financial
capacity to deliver services.
With regard to house types, the owner of this property (plot 4/201), would have preferred
a double storey house. However, due to the lottery nature of allocation, he had to make
do with the bungalow, otherwise given better economic circumstances; he would migrate
to a more up-market neighbourhood. This is a case as discussed earlier of a mismatch
between people’s needs and design options, which could have been resolved at the design
stage.
Fig.5.25, Entrance View 4/201
Fig.5.26, Lawn/Drying Area 4/201
On the other hand residential transformations which have been driven by economic
considerations are those on plot 5/437. These transformations have basically flouted the
9m building line requirement, but have remained within the allowed plot ratio and
coverage. After completing the transformations, the plinth area was increased from the
original 84m² to 184m². This changed the density on the plot from the original plot ratio
of 19.5% to 59%, while the original plot coverage of 10.5% increased to 34% Figs.5.28
and 5.29. This low coverage even after increasing the plinth area by more than 100% can
187
be attributed partly to the fact that plots adjoining the central spine measure
approximately 400m², while the average plot is about 150m². The other reason could be
that the property owners are willing to increase the density by building extensions, but
within the council’s by-laws and without building on public land. In effect they are
making a direct critique of the validity of the 9m building line along the central spine.
Fig.5.27, View from Access Road 4/201
These transformations like all others, put pressure on the infrastructural services.
Although water supply and the sewage system have performed rather well over the years,
there is water rationing from time to time. The supply of electricity is now adequate,
otherwise during the 1999 rationing period, a stand by generator had to be bought,
necessitating the building of the store/generator room next to the main house. In order to
minimise the tenant/landlady conflicts, each of the three sub-tenants have their separate
water storage tanks, water and electric meters. A separating stone wall also gives the
extensions their privacy and reduces the possibility of conflicts.
188
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
7.0M ROAD
ROAD RESERVE
A
A
COURT
FRONT ELEVATION
30M WIDE MUMIAS SOUTH ROAD
9.0M BUILDING
LINE
TIMBER FENCE
BATH
BEDRM. 4
SH.
up
DINING
PORCH
KITCHEN
DRIVE WAY
WC
LOUNGE
BEDRM. 1
BEDRM. 3
BEDRM. 2
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
TIMBER FENCE
A
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1982 )
KITCHEN
SH
KITCHEN
SH
A
( i ) USEOF A - FRAME CONSTRUCTION ON
EXTENSIONAS OPPOSED TO MONO-PITCH
HOLLOW POT CONSTRUCTION
( ii ) BUILDING BEYOND THE BUILDING LINE
BUT WITHIN THE PLOT.
STONE WALL
FENCE
STONE WALL
FENCE
7.0M ROAD
ROAD RESERVE
COURT
A
A
SECTIONAL ELEVATION A - A
30M WIDE MUMIAS SOUTH ROAD
9.0M BUILDING
LINE
B
B
KITCHEN
BEDRM.
LOUNGE
LOBBY
BEDRM.
WC
KITCH.
WC/
SH.
ROOM
1
ROOM
2
B
B
roof over
1 bedrm. unit
KITCHEN
BEDRM.
COURT
YARD
LOUNGE
LOBBY
SH
BEDRM.
WC
SH
DRIVE WAY
STONE WALL
STORE
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
roof over
store
STONE WALL
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
3.5m
7.0m
10.5m
17.5m
A
0
A
SCALE.
Fig.5.28, Transformations on 5/437
189
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1982 )
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
SCALE.
0
3.5m
7.0m
10.5m
17.5m
Fig.5.29, Original and Transformed Constructions 5/437
190
In terms of the resultant built form character, here again the morphological
transformations tend to blend within the overall context as adjoining properties are also
being transformed Fig.5.30. As mentioned before, timber roof construction is the
preferred method in the extensions rather than the maxi-span system originally used, and
concrete roofing tiles are preferred to clay tiles. These choices result mainly from the
advice given by the local fundis, who are technologically familiar with the use of the
materials they recommend.
It cost approximately Kshs 1,700,000 ($ 21,250) to build the extensions on lot 5/437,
which is quite a high investment relative to Nairobi standards in 1998 when this work
was carried out. Although the three units (two flats and a bungalow) were meant to be all
residential, the one bed roomed bungalow has been let out as a hair saloon. This is
because the location of the plot is preferred by small businesses which pay more money
than when used for residential purposes Fig.5.31. These rental units, fronting the central
spine road are accessed directly from this road, giving a sense of privacy to both the
tenants and the main household. The three units generated a monthly rental income of
Kshs 37,000 ($ 462.5) to the main household as at December 2003. This income ensures
a guaranteed source of money for the household in a system where social security is weak
and retirement benefits are not assured. In this particular case, both parents in the main
household are retirees; one of them was retrenched as a result of the application of SAPs.
It is the golden handshake funds from retrenchment that were used in building the
extensions.93
Fig.5.30, View from Spine Road 5/437
93
Fig.5.31, Interior – Hair Saloon 5/437
See the story of Adhiambo in chapter 4 – Primary Informalities.
191
It is worth noting that this property, bought in 1983 for the sum of Kshs 290,000 ($
29,000) had been fully paid for by 1998. The household pays annually land rates and rent
of Kshs 6,000 ($ 75) and Kshs 425 ($ 5.3). Garbage collection is privatised at the rate of
Kshs 200 ($ 2.5) per household per month, while security is another expense, and
according to the lady of the house;
The proximity of the property to the main road makes it insecure as the police
force is ineffective. We had to fence with an electric fence and barbed wire on the
perimeter wall; we also had to install an indoor alarm system. Those who use
group security (watchmen/Askaris) pay Kshs 200 ($ 2.5) per household per
month. (Discussion with landlady, 15.12.03).
Fig.5.30 shows the barbed wire and the fence on top of the boundary wall facing the
spine road. The other attribute to this development, is that being at the corner of the court,
it has ample car parking space Fig. 5.32.
In these transformations, the original four bed roomed house has remained unchanged
except for the addition of a small store/generator room at the rear of the house. Owners
are willing and able to risk large sums of money in building informally. Also, contrary to
a common belief that there are no rules in informal transformations, there seems to be a
common agreement on double storied extensions among all the residents within the
corridor Fig.5.34. A three storey construction in the vicinity was demolished due to
pressure by area residents; this construction is currently turning into a ruin Fig.5.35.
Fig.5.32, Ample Car Parking 5/437
192
S SOUTH
ROAD
COURT
30M WID
E MUMIA
MAIN
HOUSE
DRIVE WAY
MAIN
HOUSE
WC
STORE
BEDRM.
BEDRM.
LOBBY
SH
KITCHEN
LOUNGE
COURT
YARD
WC/
SH.
KITCH.
ROOM
1
ROOM
2
AS DESIGNED ( 1975 )
AS BUILT ( 2004 )
SCALE.
0
10m
20m
40m
Fig.5.33, Transformations - Cluster B
193
Fig5.34 Cluster B, Double Storey Exts.
Fig.5.35. Demolished 3- Storey Ext.
Residential cum Commercial Transformations
These transformations are driven by the commercial needs of creating small enterprise
outlets and lettable small apartments. The developer on plot 4/282 acknowledged that he
wanted to take advantage of the “market potential” since his plot is strategically located
at a major junction within the corridor Fig.5.12. Typically these transformations take the
form of a double storey structure opening to the road, with the ground floor and upper
floor being let out separately. The development on plot 2/814 has a one bed roomed
apartment on the ground floor and a video library on the upper floor, accessed via
external stairs Figs.5.36 and 5.37. In order to create privacy to the main house, a solid
wall with a metal gate has been built separating the extension from the main house. Like
other extensions, the new structure puts additional pressure on the infrastructural
services, and also increases the density of the development, creating plot coverage of
over 50%.
The character generated by the extension contrasts with the general milieu, but because
the adjacent properties use a similar typology in their extensions, a new language has
evolved creating its own uniqueness Fig.5.38. The consistent use of a mono pitch lean to
roof and the use of a timber roof structure deviate from the original construction system
as earlier discussed.
In terms of income generation and job creation, the video library employs one person and
generates a rental income of Kshs 9,000 ($ 112.5) per month for the landlord. The tenant
pays for the privatised garbage disposal service and the night time security at the rate of
Kshs 150 ($ 1.875) and Kshs 300 ($ 3.75) per month respectively. To reduce the
194
tenant/landlord conflicts, the tenants pay their own electricity and water bills, while the
landlord pays all statutory payments.
bedrm. 1
bedrm. 2
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
6.0M ROAD
COURT
SECTION A - A
bedrm.
1
A
bedrm.
2
A
wc
COURT
bedrm.
3
bath
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
9.0M SET BACK
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
living
dining
BACK YARD
COURT
kitchen
GATE
wc
18.0
MW
yard
( i ) USE OF WOODEN FENCE
AND GATE
A
IDE
ROA
D
A
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1975 )
( i ) USE OF STONE WALL ON BOUNDARY
AND STEEL GATES
STONE WALL
FENCE
STONE WALL
FENCE
STONE WALL
FENCE
6.0M ROAD
COURT
SECTIONAL ELEVATION A - A
A
A
VIDEO LIBRARY
COURT
room 2
sh/wc
room 1
kitch
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
STONE WALL
FENCE
A
yard
STONE WALL
FENCE
( i ) USE OF STONE WALLON BOUNDARY
AND STEEL GATE
bedrm.
living
sh/wc
IDE
ROA
D
COURT
kitch
18.0
MW
A
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
SCALE.
0
3m
6m
9m
15m
Fig.5.36, Transformations on 2/814
195
On this particular property, the ground floor tenant was exempted from any payments,
since she was the daughter of the landlord, who needed her independence without being
far from the family home. This extension was therefore quite appropriate. Although these
transformations may be considered illegal in the eyes of the city planning department,
they gain legitimacy through the council’s own water department, which has officially
supplied water to them. The extensions are further legitimised by the Kenya Power and
Lighting Company, which has made official power supply.
Fig.5.37, Video Library 2/814
Fig.5.38, New Architectural Character
The transformations on plot 4/281 create two small shops on the ground floor and a one
bed roomed apartment on the upper floor Fig.5.39. From a design point of view, the
placement of the new structure, compromises the privacy of the kitchen in the main house
including blocking the stair window. The combined effect of the transformations on plots
2/281-284 creates a tunnel effect between the main houses and the extensions Figs.5.12
and 5.40. This may cause a Banuli effect in case of high winds, which can damage the
roofs and the general building fabric. It is evident that the transformations on the four
plots all have balconies that cantilever beyond the plot boundaries and into the road
reserve, as required by the building by-laws. This is a good example of the interface of
informal and formal practices Fig.5.41.94
The landlord on 2/281, who has lived with his family on this property for more than
twenty years, carried out the transformations in 1999, when the mortgage had been fully
amortised. It cost in excess of Kshs 1,000,000 ($ 12,500) to build these extensions, which
94
See for example; De Soto, 2001; Hansen and Vaa, 2004, for the discussion on the interface between the
formal and the informal.
196
generate a combined monthly income of Kshs 15,000 ($ 187.5). This rental income is
rather low for the size of extensions; this is partly because the landlord’s wife runs one of
the ground floor shops as a Home Based Enterprise (HBE), and does not pay rent for use
of the shop. It is important to re-emphasise that the transformations were necessitated in
order to capture the market potential for subletting, through which a regular income can
be guaranteed.
Another transformation on plot 4/284, has a cyber café on the ground floor and a hair
salon upstairs Figs.5.42, 5.43 and 5.44. The cyber café which started operating in 2001
generates employment for three people on a full time basis and one person on a part-time
basis. The café pays the landlord a monthly rent of Kshs 12,000 ($ 150), while the
electricity bill of about Kshs 6,000 ($ 75) per month for the whole property is shared on a
50-50 basis between the landlord and the tenants. The water bill of approximately Kshs
1,500 ($ 18.75) is paid for in a similar manner.
The café pays an annual trade license fee of Kshs 10,000 ($ 125), while the landlord
makes the other statutory payments. Mumias South Road as a transport spine, creates a
very good catchment area for the cyber café, which serves about 80-120 customers per
day. The hair saloon on the upper floor pays a monthly rent of Kshs 10,500 ($ 131.25),
while the water and electricity bills are shared with the cyber café as earlier discussed.
Similar to the café, an annual trade license fee of Kshs 10,000 ($ 125) is paid. The
business which creates jobs for three people has ample space to serve 6-10 clients per
day. It required in excess of Kshs 100,000 ($ 1,250) worth of investment to start the
saloon, which had operated for 2.5 years by December 2003.
It can be argued that the cyber café similarly required an initial investment capital in
excess of Kshs 300,000 ($ 3,750) to start operating with six work stations.95 From the
foregoing, it is clear that some of these small enterprises require a sizeable sum of money
for the initial investment. They can be seen as illegal in the eyes of city planners, they
however create job opportunities for many people, and also create a steady income for
landlords. The fact that many have been operating for a while without closing means that
they
are
sustainable,
and
could
benefit
by
being
incorporated
in
formal
systems/operations.
95
See chapter 4, Table 3.
197
bedrm. 2
wc/sh
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
living
dining
yard
6.0 M ROAD
SECTIONAL ELEVATION
bedrm. 3
hwc
bedrm. 2
kitchen
wc
W I DE ROAD
bedrm. 1
TIMBER FENCE
sto
GATE
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
box c pbd.
A
sh/wc
BACK YARD
COURT
living
A
dining
15 . 0 M
TIMBER FENCE
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1980 )
CONC. ROOF TILES
ON TIMBER RAFTERS
EX. TIMBER FASCIA
BOARD PAINTED TO
APPROVAL
pv
kitch.
bedrm. 2
STONE WALL
( i ) USE OF A - FRAME AS OPPOSED
TO LEAN TO HOLLOW POT
CONSTRUCTION
balc.
pv
PURPOSE MADE GLAZED
STEEL CASEMENT WINDOWS
shop
COURT
6.0 M ROAD
SECTIONAL ELEVATION
pv
pv
room 2
pv
balcony
dn
pv
pv
wc/sh
pv
pv
room 1
up
GATE
pv
pv
pv
shop
pv
pv
A
15 . 0 M
6,000
COURT
W I DE ROAD
FIRST FLOOR PLAN
pv
shop
pv
6.0M BUILDING LINE
room
GROUND FLOOR PLAN
pv
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
SCALE.
A
0
3m
6m
9m
15m
Fig.5.39, Transformations 4/281
198
Fig.5.40, Narrow Gap Between Old and New (Tunnel effect)
Fig.5.41, Cantilevered Balconies
199
bedrm. 2
wc/sh
TIMBER FENCE
TIMBER FENCE
living
dining
TIMBER FENCE
yard
COURT
6.0 M ROAD
SECTION A - A
A
A
sh/wc
hwc
bedrm. 2
COURT
W I DE ROAD
bedrm. 3
FIRST FOOR PLAN
6.0M
SET BACK
6.0M
BUILDING LINE
A
dining
A
TIMBER FENCE
GATE
bedrm. 1
box cpbd.
wc
COURT
15 . 0 M
living
sto
TIMBER FENCE
kitchen
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1980 )
GROUND FOOR PLAN
( i ) USE OF A - FRAME TIMBER TRUSS
ON EXTENSIONS
office
balc.
STONE WALL FENCE
new room
COURT
6.0 M ROAD
SECTION A - A
6.0 M
SET BACK
A
A
office
COURT
W I DE ROAD
salon
balcony
wc
FIRST FOOR PLAN
A
15 . 0 M
new
room
STONE WALL
FENCE
wc
A
rm. 2
COURT
cyber cafe
GATE
p/
copy
GROUND FOOR PLAN
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
rm. 1
SCALE.
0
3m
6m
9m
15m
Fig.5.42, Transformations on 4/284
200
Fig.5.43, Interior – Cyber Café 4/284
Fig.5.44, Interior – Hair Saloon 4/284
201
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1980 )
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 1992 )
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
SCALE.
0
3m
6m
9m
15m
Fig.5.45, Phased Transformations 4/284
202
Transformations of the Shopping Centre
The Buru Buru shopping centre lies within the corridor in what was originally conceived
as the commercial and social amenities zone, on the western side of the corridor. The
centre was initially designed to have 20 double storey shops and two restaurants, but only
11 shops and one restaurant were built during the implementation phase Fig.5.47. This
action, on the on set created pre-conditions for subsequent informal commercial
developments during the consolidation phase of the estate. Currently many informal
outlets have sprung up within the corridor to fill the gap left by the initial inadequate
shopping provision. A large market has evolved on the footpath linking Buru Buru and
Umoja estates, commonly known as Mutindwa Fig.5.46.
The shops and restaurant that were built 30 years ago have also undergone morphological
transformations over this period with nearly all the shop balconies being converted into
internal spaces Fig.5.48. Many commercial outlets have also engulfed the one restaurant
originally built, now commonly known as the “Mausoleum”. I now discuss the
transformations that have taken place on the “Mausoleum” to some detail.
Fig.5.46, Shopping Centre 2003 (Informal Market – bottom left)
203
WC WC WC WC
BUTCHERY
4.5M WIDE SERVICE ROAD
POST
OFFICE
BUTCHERY
MH
WC
SNACK BAR
KITCHEN
LIQUOR
STORE
MH
WC
WC
LOUNGE
MALE
WC FEMALE
WC
SHOPPING CENTRE
MH
WC
SNACK BAR
KITCHEN
LOUNGE
COUNTER
LIQUOR
STORE
WC
MH
MALE
WC
FEMALE WC
WC
30M WI
DE MU
MIAS SO
UTH RO
AD
AS DESIGNED ( 1975 )
WC WC WC WC
BUTCHERY
4.5M WIDE SERVICE ROAD
POST
OFFICE
BUTCHERY
WC
SHOPPING CENTRE
SNACK BAR
KITCHEN
MOSOLEUM
TERRACE
LIQUOR
STORE
WC
MALE
WC
FEMALE WC
WC
30M WI
DE MU
MIAS SO
UT
H ROAD
AS BUILT ( 1975 )
4.5M WIDE SERVICE ROAD
COUNTER
WC WC WC WC
BUTCHERY
TENTS PUB
SEATING
POST
OFFICE
SEATING
F
M
KITCH.
SEATING
WINDS
PUB
DJ
SEATING
BUTCHERY
FOOD
KIOSK
FOOD
KIOSK
BUTCHERY
SEATING
JIKO
CHEMIST
1
BUTCHERY
WC
HARDWARE
SHOPPING CENTRE
SNACK BAR
KITCHEN
MOSOLEUM
TERRACE
WC
MALE
WC
BAR
FEMALE WC
COUNTER
CHEMIST
2
OFFICE
LIQUOR
STORE
WC
PLAY
STATION
PLAY
STATION
BARBER SHOP
SHOP
FOOD
KIOSK
FOOD
KIOSK
SALON
30M WI
DE MU
HARDWARE
FOOD
KIOSK
ELECTRICAL
SHOP
HARDWARE
MIAS SO
UT
H ROAD
AS BUILT ( 2004 )
SCALE.
0
20m
40m
80m
Fig.5.47, Cluster D - Shopping Centre Transformations
204
Fig.5.48, External Balconies Internalised
Fig.5.49, Informal Market – Mutindwa Thoroughfare
205
Transformations of the “Mausoleum”
The “Mausoleum” originally designed by Colin Buchanan and Partners in 1975, as one of
the two identical bar and restaurants, has been gradually transformed informally so that
we now have an additional 20 subtenants renting peripheral extensions from the main
restaurant owner Fig.5.50. These extensions generally use alternative building materials
e.g. c.g.i roofing sheets as opposed to clay tiles and block board or sheet metal as
opposed to masonry walling. These extensions have put a lot of pressure on the sanitary
facilities and the water and power supply to the “Mausoleum”. The original yard to the
kitchen of the restaurant has been built up, blocking the natural lighting and ventilation to
the kitchen and toilets.
These 20 subtenants create job opportunities for many unemployed people and also
generate an income for the restaurant owner. More than 40 jobs have been created by
these transformations; as a result the restaurant owner earns a monthly income in excess
of Kshs 100,000 ($ 1,250). Ukweli Fabricator and General Hardware is one of the 20
subtenants Fig.5.51. The proprietor of this business, who is a qualified welder/fitter,
started the business on the current site in 2002 after relocating from elsewhere. He had
earlier been retrenched in 1992, when SAPs of right sizing were invoked by his previous
employer.96 He opted to venture into the Jua Kali sector, and currently has a work force
of 6 people. These employees are paid on a weekly basis at the rate of Kshs 300 ($ 3.75)
for a fundi per day while the mtu wa mukono (casual labourer) is paid Kshs 200 ($ 2.5).
The foreman is paid Kshs 9,000 ($ 112.5) per month. This business pays kshs 10,00012,000 ($ 125-150) per month for rent and electricity. There is only one meter for the
restaurant and all the 20 subtenants, so they have agreed to share the electricity payment.
In order to secure the premises, particularly during the night, watchmen are hired by
tenants who each pay Kshs 250 ($ 3.125) per month. This case of Ukweli is an example
of how most tenants operate.97 It was also observed that most of these businesses have
been operational for the last five years or so and are generally stable. Like most other
small enterprises, they pay the local authority annual trade license fees, thereby gaining
some form of legitimacy.
96
This situation is similar to that of Adhiambo (Chapter 4), and is also similar to that discussed in
residential transformations.
97
The formation of peer group associations is discussed by De Soto, 2001.
206
LIQUOR
STORE
LOUNGE
SOUTH ELEVATION
SECTION A - A
WC
SNACK BAR
KITCHEN
LOUNGE
BAR
LIQUOR
STORE
WC
SERVICE
YARD
MALE
WC
FEMALE WC
WC
FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1975 )
SOUTH ELEVATION
FOOD
KIOSK
19
18
FOOD
KIOSK
BUTCHERY
SEATING
20
JIKO
CHEMIST
2
1
BUTCHERY
store
CHEMIST
HARDWARE
HARDWARE
TERRACE
3
LIQUOR
STORE
LOUNGE
OFFICE
SECTION A - A
17
OFFICE
TERRACE
PLAY
STATION
BAR
16
4
PLAY
STATION
COUNTER
BARBER SHOP
5
SHOP
15
FOOD
KIOSK
FOOD
KIOSK
12
14
13
SALON
11
10
9
HARDWARE
8
FOOD
KIOSK
ELECTRICAL
SHOP
7
HARDWARE
6
( i ) USE OF ALTERNATIVE MATERIALS
ON NEW EXTENSIONS,
( ii ) G.C.I. AS OPPOSED TO CLAY TILES.
( iii ) B/BOARD OR METAL SHEETS AS OPPOSED
TO MASONRY.
SCALE.
FLOOR PLAN
0
3.5m
7m
14m
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
Fig.5.50, Transformations – “Mausoleum”
207
Fig.5.51, Ukweli Fabricators
Fig.5.52, Buru Buru Centre (Mausoleum to the left)
208
Other Transformations
Recently other shopping outlets have been built, some rising as high as 5 floors Figs.5.49,
5.53 and 5.54. Winds and Tents pubs located on one of the original shops caused the
transformation of this shop. The 4m fire gap (public passage way) adjacent to these pubs
has been annexed and converted to private use of the pubs Figs 5.55 and 5.57. In general
the Buru Buru shopping area is now a bee-hive of activities with the advent of new
shopping outlets like the Uchumi Supermarket and Tusker Mattresses. However the short
coming of these informal transformations is that, there is insufficient car parking
provision, making it difficult for motorised shoppers. Other outlets have also sprung up in
the form of disused containers, which are now used as retail outlets Fig.5.56.
Fig.5.53, Recent Developments
Fig.5.54, Tusker Mattresses Supermarket
(A shift from the original centre)
Fig.5.55, Interior-Tents Pub
Fig.5.56, Converted Disused Container
(Annexed 4m Passage)
(Coca Cola Outlet).
209
4.5M SERVICE ROAD
SECTION A - A
4.0M WIDE
PASSAGE
4.0M WIDE
PASSAGE
ELEVATION 01
ELEVATION 02
01
BUTCHERY
WC
02
BUTCHERY
BACK YARD
WC
WC
WC
4.0M WIDE PASSAGE
A
A
LAUNDRY
FLOOR PLAN
ORIGINAL CONSRUCTION ( 1975 )
TENTS PUB
WINDS PUB
SECTION A - A
SECTION B - B
BUTCHERY
M
ELEVATION 01
JIKO
COUNTER
DJ
ELEVATION 02
WC
COUNTER
SEATING
A
SEATING
SEATING
LAUNDRY
SEATING
A
B
SEATING
WINDS
PUB
B
F
WC
TENTS PUB
KITCH.
WC
02
01
BUTCHERY
WC
FLOOR PLAN
SCALE.
TRANSFORMED CONSRUCTION ( 2004 )
0
4.0
8.0
16.0
Fig.5.57, Tents and Winds Pubs (Annexed 4m Passage)
210
6. CONCLUSIONS
Summary
In this concluding chapter, I first address issues arising directly from urban process in
Nairobi as covered by the four informal categories discussed in the main text. Broader
urban issues arising from the phenomenon of informality are then subsequently
addressed, and thereby bridging the particular and the general.
The Urban Process in Nairobi
This study has shown that although informality has always impacted on Nairobi’s urban
process, it was limited to the city’s periphery during the colonial period. This scenario
arose due to the strict enforcement of authoritarian legislation, which was however
relaxed in the post-colonial period, and thereby enabling informality to infiltrate the city
proper. It was also shown that the development control structures inherited at
independence were designed to contain settlement; these structures were unable to cope
with the demand for growth due to the increased influx of people into the city in the postcolonial period. To exacerbate the situation, the colonial legacy of commoditisation of
space and the issuance of individual land titles, allowed individuals to engage in informal
transformations within their individual lots.
With regard to urban land, most land within and around Nairobi is either government or
privately owned, a fact which has led to a system of clientelism and patronage. This
system enables government operatives to subdivide and allocate government land at a fee
for their own individual benefit. The allottees then build structures for renting, where
they may reside in part of the structure, or altogether be absent. These structures are
based on the 1920s 10ft by 12ft bachelor bed space module which has persisted to this
day. This 10ft by 12ft module as was seen in chapter 4 also determines how overall space
is commoditised. Unlike other cities, in Nairobi there are very few pure squatters; most
residents in informal settlements are tenants or renters, who pay rent to structure owners.
This urban process, although helpful to the poor is not sustainable, as it is based on
selfish short term interests of government officials and other middlemen. A more
211
transparent urban process, based on a clear land use policy would contribute to the
common good of all residents.
It was also shown that survivalist informalities, although mobile/transient and not
manifested by physical structures, still impacts on space use, as it utilises communication
spines for its operations. Additional space for these activities has to be factored into
circulation corridors, for harmony to prevail among the various interested parties.
Informal practices, particularly those in the primary category can be a source of lucrative
business, even if the risks are high as was shown for example, by Alecky Food Kiosk
plus structure ownership in informal settlements.
The lack of a clear land use/housing policy has not helped the city, as it has made it
difficult to articulate any physical development agenda. For this reason among others,
many middle income residents who are willing and able to pay for urban services and
infrastructure are left with no option but to source for these services informally. In fact,
Jamhuri II development discussed in chapter 4 and Buru Buru, discussed in chapter 5 are
morphological transformations occurring by default, due to the lack of clear policies.
These transformations are not without rules as is normally assumed. Transformations in
Mumias South Corridor strictly adhered to the double storey typology, and constructions
beyond two floors were forcibly demolished. To planners and architects, these
transformations can be a source of useful practices in terms of minimum standards and
densities. The above not withstanding, these individualised transformations are not cost
effective, and in the long term, well co-ordinated collective strategies will produce more
affordable and better designed settlements. Experiments can be carried out using various
options; site and services, core housing, shell only etc.
The informal urban process currently produces the largest additional housing stock in
Nairobi, in addition to generating employment opportunities for many residents. From the
late 1970s, neither the government nor the city council has developed any new housing or
commercial outlets for the increasing population; it is the informal process that has filled
this gap. This informal process has also made it possible to integrate different income
groups in housing areas. In Buru Buru for example, many single roomed or one bedroom
apartments resulting from transformations are let out to people from the low income
212
group. These people ordinarily would have been unable to live in this type of
neighbourhood without informal transformations.
This study has also shown that the strategies taken by players in “diverse informalities”
are sensitive and in tandem with prevailing economic circumstances. In most cases these
strategies are socio-economic and spatial as opposed to social or legal. Survivalist
operators/hawkers, often position themselves strategically according to the human traffic
dynamics, which is a similar strategy many kiosk operators make. However the use of
road reserves for roadside enterprises remains unstructured and informal. This could be
enhanced if minimal services were provided, for example; sanitation, water and power
supply. The urban process in Nairobi also showed that players in the intermediate and
affluent informal categories mostly engage in spatial transformations, and consequently
live with the legal and social implications that arise due to these transformations. In this
regard, many Nairobians are willing to tolerate higher densities particularly in ex-formal
settlements like Buru Buru. The additional monetary income accruing from
transformations compensates for the increased densities. More over, in a system where
retirement benefits are not well structured, income from extensions/alterations becomes a
source of livelihood during retirement for many middle income retirees.
The urban process in Nairobi has shown that about 60% of the residents live in informal
settlements. In addition many people across all social-economic strata participate in the
informal urban process; to the extent it can be argued that less than 20% of the urban
process is formal. There is therefore a need for creating an environment where the more
than 80% of the urban process can increasingly be formalised. This presupposition is
based on the fact that informality is not cheap, and occurs by default due to dysfunctional
formal processes.
It was also shown that informalities can evolve from one category to another (evolution
of a kiosk, Fig.4.7). This evolutionary approach can be a very useful strategy in the urban
process, particularly with regard to phased development in conditions of limited
resources. The three dimensional upgrading approach in Huruma by Pamoja Trust, if
used in a large scale can increase population densities two to three fold. These can then
enable the infusion of infrastructure and social facilities in informal settlements, if
upgrading is carried out in-situ.
213
The transformations of the “Mausoleum” enabled 20 small scale enterprises to join the
Nairobi economy. These transformations also had a multiplier effect of generating several
employment opportunities for young people. These transformations were carried out
using alternative building materials e.g. corrugated iron sheets as opposed to clay tiles;
block board instead of concrete bricks etc. It was also evident that even in residential
transformations; there was the prevalence of the use of alternative building materials, for
example; trussed roof structure as opposed to mass produced maxi span slabs. The use of
alternative materials and the employment of local fundis is a response to the small scale
nature of these constructions and to local technological know how.
I also reiterate that although informal transformations have been dominant in Nairobi’s
urban process, they generally impact negatively on the existing infrastructure.
Illegal/informal connections to the sewage system, water and power supply, denies the
authorities much needed revenue. The carrying capacity of the services are stretched to
the limit, resulting in; sewer bursts, power surges and water shortages.
From the study of Nairobi’s “Diverse Informalities”, I conclude that; for there to be a
more responsive urban process:•
The contribution of the informal sector should be recognised and brought on
board.
•
Urban planning and design should be two-pronged; both from above and
below.
•
More resources, both financial and human, should be made available for
urban development, including a serious political commitment.
The above conclusions arise directly from Nairobi’s urban process, what now follows are
conclusions based on broader issues raised by “Diverse Informalities”, with regard to the
phenomenon of informality.
Re-conceptualising Informality
Current tools for analysing the informal phenomenon are inadequate for interpreting the
urban condition in most third world cities. There are dominant traits that simplify the
phenomenon into false dichotomies and unnecessary polarities; formal vs. informal, land
use values vs. exchange values the state vs. the poor etc. (Castillo, 2000). Earlier notions
214
of the phenomenon of informal urbanisation appear in the work of Turner and Abrams
(Abrams, 1964; Turner, 1968), but the first time the term informal was used with regard
to urban policy was with the International Labour Office (ILO) Employment Mission to
Kenya in 1972. At that time, studies on informality started as an economic concept,
which later transformed into social and spatial concepts (Vidrovitch, 1991). It should
however be noted that some informal practices were already embedded in the precolonial social economy. Therefore the informal sector (informality) was not a new
reality, but as a residential and professional social category, it was produced as soon as
Western capitalism entered Africa. On the other hand, some Marxist researchers have
seen “informal” as a bourgeois term that covers up class relations.
After initially embracing the concept of informal vs. formal, a number of social scientists
began arguing that the dichotomy was not really helpful at all; actual cases of informal
economic activity proved to be closely tied to the formal economy; and this undermined,
it was argued the usefulness of maintaining the dichotomy (e.g. Skar, 1985). Nustad in
Hansen and Vaa, 2004 on the other hand asserted that labelling of some social
phenomenon as “informal” received widespread popularity in the 1970s, after Keith Hart,
1973 coined the term “informal economy”, one of a few concepts which have originated
in anthropology and then has been taken up by economists. The term “informal” was
originally meant to draw attention to the limitations of a certain approach to
understanding economic activities: the application of economic models that rested on
understanding of economic activities as rational and thereby open to enumeration. The
informal was coined as a term for acts and processes that escaped these models: all the
activities that were not captured by the economists’ understanding of what economic
activities entailed. Thus “informality” is not itself a characteristic of an activity; it only
signifies that it has been left out by a definition that is “formal”. But as the history of this
concept clearly demonstrates, in naming there lies a peril; “the informal” instead of
denoting a flux of social practices, was instead encompassed by formal models as a
residual category for everything that escaped the conceptual grid of administrators and
academics. The concepts “formal” and “informal” are useful as long as one recognises
that informal practices are both constituted by, and must be analysed in relationship to,
formal practices (Nustad in Hansen and Vaa, 2004:46).
215
The “informal dimension” is seen as a peculiar character of African urban reality. It is the
dimension that, according to Simone, 2002 new forms of social interaction are
developing and consolidating. They demand to be interpreted with innovative conceptual
tools in order to be able to re-think the models of urban development and institutional
typologies necessary to ensure a sustainable future to African cities.
The categorisation of the informal phenomenon into self-help, spontaneous, informal etc.
continues to marginalise and exclude from mainstream urbanity a large percentage of the
process producing third world urbanity. Concepts such as traditional or informal sector
are dead-ends. African cultural processes and African problems of unemployment are
neither traditional nor informal (Vidrovitch, 1991:74). I choose to call third world
urbanity “diverse urbanisms” as opposed to informal urbanity, so as to discard the stigma
of informality (informality has generally been regarded as undesirable). By so doing, I
acknowledge that the informal process involves much more than the construction of
dwellings. With regard to human settlements, empirical evidence in Nairobi shows three
categories
of
informal
settlements;
squatting,
illegal
subdivisions
and
alteration/extensions. The boundaries between these categories are not clear cut, as they
tend to merge into each other seamlessly. Informality in Nairobi is heterogeneous, and in
attempting to understand this phenomenon better, I propose “diverse informalities” as a
tool for this inquiry. “Diverse Informalities” is a way of re-conceptualising the complex
nature of the phenomenon of informality, with an emphasis on the spatial dimension, as
opposed to models guided by legal, economic, social or anthropological distinctions. The
informal urban process in Nairobi is characterised by diversity across the socio-economic
strata of society thereby creating “diverse informalities”. I grouped these informalities
into four categories; survivalist, primary, intermediate and affluent. Table 4.1 in chapter
four showed the salient features of each of the categories, and, it is hoped that this
categorisation and analysis will help in the deconstruction of informal urbanisation.
Merits and Demerits of Informality
In informal urbanisation, we are faced with many issues relevant to planning today, from
social equity and poverty mitigation, economic growth and development to urban
management and social participation. On top of these, informal urbanisation remains in
216
many respects an unsustainable trajectory with regards to the environment. Informality is
a condition with important spatial connotations for the episteme of architecture and
planning, and for the improvement of urban policies.
A large percentage of the residents of Nairobi are living informally due to the mismatch
between provision and demand for urban goods and services. In this regard, Simone,
2002 posited that;
The present is a time of great difficulty in urban Africa. The majority of urban
residents are living with fewer resources, capacities and hopes. Their sense of
space, time and possibility is being altered. It is a life of no thought for tomorrow
and “we are between life and death” are common expressions in Addis Ababa
(Simone, 2002:2).
Regardless of these uncertainties, African urban actors continue to make something of
their cities. They continue to use them as contexts in which to secure some, albeit, limited
livelihood and access to the larger world. In trying to cope with the difficulties of
everyday life, households engage in multiple income-generating activities instead of
specialising in the development and growth of particular economic activities.
At independence in 1963, Kenya’s new ruling elite opted for a policy of continuity rather
than change. This policy allowed Nairobi to evolve into a self-help city in the 1960s, in
defiance to government, resisting control and regulation. The continued use of the
colonial model of governance gradually led to an informal political order.
This political order is a system grounded in a reciprocal type of interdependence
between leaders, courtiers and the populace. And is a system that works, however
imperfectly (Chabal and Daloz, 1999).
This informal political system, functions in the here and now, not for the sake of a
hypothetical tomorrow. Its legitimacy rests with its immediate achievements, not with
long term ambitions, and as Chabal and Daloz summed it;
In Africa, it is expected that politics will lead to personal enrichment just as it is
expected that wealth will have direct influence on political matters. Rich men are
powerful. Powerful men are rich. Wealth and power are inextricably linked
(Chabal and Daloz, 1999:52).
217
The inherited colonial urban structures encouraged many people to live a dual culture,
with a strong connection to a rural homestead, a phenomenon Lonsdale, 2002 has
referred to as “straddling”. The colonial legacy also had a strong anti-urban stance, where
the town was seen as an evil place (Burja, 1975; Hake, 1977; Lonsdale in Burton,
2002).The urbanisation process in Nairobi is not being accompanied by adequate
economic growth, thereby creating room for informal processes which enhance the
urbanisation of poverty. In Nairobi however, these informal processes are not limited to
the urban poor, but occur across all socio-economic levels of society. These processes
make it possible for the poor to access some limited means of livelihood. The informal
sector creates jobs for the urban poor, which the formal sector is unable to create. This
sector is the engine behind the many physical/morphological transformations taking place
in Nairobi, which may be driven by the desire to survive or for capital accumulation.
The desire to survive leads to the creation of small Home Based Enterprises (HBEs), for
self or family. The desire for capital accumulation leads to the creation of additional
lettable space, which can generate rental income, where the owner may be resident or
non-resident. In addition, informality has several negative attributes, for example the
allocation of land through the chief, informal yet officially sanctioned, provides benefits
to some officials and underpins a system of patronage (NISCC, 1997:3). Evidence shows
that in the Nairobi situation, there are no squatters per se; rather there are illegal
slum/landlords that collect rent from illegal tenants. This system does not provide
adequate tenure, and makes absentee slum/landlords reluctant to reinvest in informal
settlements, leaving the poor structures and infrastructure to further decay. The profits
from informal settlements accrue largely to these absentee landlords, while the haphazard
layouts prevent the introduction of services. The high densities in these settlements lead
to overcrowding, seriously endangering the health of inhabitants who have poor access to
health services. However, these settlements do provide cheap accommodation which the
poor can afford, something which the formal sector, be it public or private, has been
unable to achieve.
Informal urban processes put extra pressure on existing infrastructural services by way of
illegal connections, making them to further deteriorate. This extra pressure has so far,
somehow been absorbed by the Nairobi system. This could be as a result of engineers’
218
tendency of using a big safety factor in the initial design. If infrastructural services are
legally provided in informal settlements, they carry a symbolic dimension, since they
give security in the land tenure when legal land tenure is not yet acquired. The emphasis
on infrastructure in upgrading projects quite often negates the primacy of aesthetics
thereby impacting negatively on the urban fabric.
From the early 1990s, neo-liberalism made the state retreat from providing urban services
in addition to the liberalisation of trade, markets and financial systems. This retreat led to
the privatisation of these services, yet many residents continue to pay the state statutory
fees towards these same services. This lack of direct intervention has also encouraged
many private developers to provide inadequate services in their developments. In Buru
Buru for example, the omission in building adequate shopping facilities, facilitated the
mushrooming of informal outlets for these services. In addition it created room for
manipulation and clientelism in the allocation of commercial plots in the central
commercial zone. These allocations have enabled privateers to build commercial high
rise buildings in this zone Fig.6.1. The majority of these types of developments do not
have lifts, making the upper floors uncomfortable for users.
Fig.6.1, Commercial High Rise Developments
219
Creating a Different Urbanity
In the colonial and the immediate post-colonial period, the main producer of urban space
was the state (public sector). However, the main producer of urban space from the late
1970s increasingly became the private sector, particularly the informal sector when it
comes to urban space production in Nairobi. The inherited legal frameworks for urban
development were designed to contain settlement rather than deal with rapid growth. This
framework could not cope with the rapid population growth that occurred in the postcolonial period, leading to rapid informal urbanisation, which created its own type of
urbanity. This urbanity was basically dominated by mix-use activities and structures, a
contradiction to the post war European modernist functional city, which had previously
modelled Nairobi’s urbanity.
The regime change from the colonial to the new African elite did not change colonial
urban structures, and the new regime continued to use these structures in the changed
circumstances. In this regard Rossi posits that “the moments of institutional change can
not necessarily be related to the evolution of urban form” (Rossi, 1982). For example
Haghia Sofia in Istanbul has served as a mosque, or a cathedral depending on who was in
power, either Muslims or Christians. Therefore on the attainment of independence,
Nairobi’s urban form and for that matter its production and consumption of urban space
remained basically colonial. However, the urban realities of; poverty, unemployment,
mismanagement, corruption etc. have made it possible for a different type of urbanity to
evolve in Nairobi.
It is evident that, urbanisation in most third world cities (Nairobi included) was guided by
the prevailing global development paradigms illustrated in Table 6.1. All these paradigms
did not produce the desired urbanity and economic growth, and Nairobi continued to
develop informally. Because of this failure, in the 1980s, there was a relaxation of the
inherited rigid development control measures. This gave rise to upgrading projects,
whose emphasis was on settlement regularisation. However, regularisation is not entirely
neutral, it is closely tied to political patronage, and consensus building and party favours
(Castillo, 2000).Regularisation, makes settlers dependent on political favours, where
urbanity is granted through political negotiation. This urbanisation by decree, forces
residents to invest more in political actions and lobbying than in productive activities that
220
would improve their economic and social conditions. Regularisation policies are also
problematic, as they focus primarily on the issue of tenure, rather than on a broader
conception of the urbanisation logic. The assumption that only through legal
transformations, the informal segment of the city would be incorporated, ignored that
regularisation is just a minor step incorporating informal settlements to the city.
Evidence shows that in Africa, human relationships are more important than legal
procedures. On this basis, Jenkins posits that, the emphasis on legality and economics as
the main variables in urban processes should be minimised and social, cultural and
political variables enhanced. He further argues that “in reality, levels of legality range
from full illegality through complex matrices to levels of legality” (Jenkins in Hansen
and Vaa, 2004:211).
Table 4. Global Development Paradigms and their Characteristics
Time
Dominant
Geopolitical
Strategy for
Period
Orthodoxy
Trends
Urbanisation
1960s
Modernisation
Emergence of
Import substitution
Theory with a
newly independent
strategy for
strong Western
countries and the
industrialisation.
bias
cold war
Slum eradication
Growth and
Cold war,
Focus on site and
Redistribution
Oil shock and the
service schemes,
Theory.
Emergence of
self-help projects,
Basic Needs
Debt crisis
core housing etc.
1970s
Theory.
Projects to satisfy:
Affordability-Cost
Recovery and
Replicability
221
1980s
Emergence of the
Debt crisis Full -
Problems of affo-
Neo-liberal Theory
blown.
rdability came to
Severe economic
fore.
decline of develo-
Tacit acceptance
ping countries
of informal settlements.
Relaxation of laws.
1990s
Neo-liberal Theory
End of cold war.
Cities increasingly
the driving orthod-
Increased empha-
seen as engines
oxy.
sis on democrati-
of economic growth.
Emphasis on
sation based on
Restrictive building
Enablement and
Western models.
and land-use sta-
Good governance
ndards increasingly
being phased out.
2000s
Sustainable Liveli-
USA as the
Privatisation.
hoods Theory.
dominant super
Focus on private/
Focus on poverty
power.
publis sector
eradication
Increasing urban
partnerships
poverty.
Source: Authors Reconstruction from Syagga, 2002
This emphasis on legality could be having its roots in the history of local authorities. In
the 1930s the “amateur” period of civic management had come to an end, and civic
authorities had to lean on professionals. The town clerk (a lawyer), became the chief
executive of the local authority during this period of professionalizing civic management.
This could be one reason why many urban issues are addressed through legal lenses. This
colonial legacy has not helped in the complex post-colonial urban condition, since the
variables at play quite often are beyond legalities. May be what urban areas require is to
have a chief executive who is competent in planning and urban management.
222
Regularisation suffers another problem, the operational legal regime is that inherited from
the colonial period and has little changed in the post-colonial period. For example, the
British Town and Country Planning Act of 1932, is the source of planning law in Kenya
and other ex-colonies. The Public Health Act is another neo-colonial Act that has a
bearing on urbanity, as the use of the grid iron layout pattern enhanced the enforcement
of the Public Health Act. The grid iron pattern also enabled the ease of surveillance and
domination (Myers, 2003). It can also be argued that tenure regularisation without
physical planning doesn’t work. This is because regularisation involves legal procedures
which may have little bearing on spatial configurations. For tenure regularisation to work,
it must go hand in hand with physical planning, where spatial policies are also addressed.
The notion that legal land title will prompt settlers to improve and upgrade their
dwellings does not necessarily work. Settlers in addition to legal land titles, also require
technical support in the form of design typologies, access to affordable finance and state
support in the provision of infrastructural services (collective consumption goods).
New urban forms are also resulting from the inadequacy of current legislation. The bylaw requiring spatial configurations of settlements to have building set backs along roads
is a case in point. In Buru Buru for example, set backs of 6-9m were allowed on access
and distributor roads. These set backs as discussed in chapter five, have over the years
undergone major transformations, with many people building up to the plot boundaries in
defiance of the by-law. The emerging different urbanity, where there is scarcity of
affordable serviced land cannot afford the luxury of 6-9m building set backs. In this
urbanity, people are addressing the realities of Nairobi’s socio-economic and political
conditions. In this urbanity, people are willing to compromise on environmental quality
by tolerating higher densities, as long as there are monetary gains accruing from these
higher densities.
Security is another variable shaping this new urbanity; many pedestrian passageways
have been closed both in Nairobi’s CBD and residential areas. In Buru Buru, many
courtyards now have only one entry/exit point manned by askaris, and fitted with metal
grille gates or turn pikes, creating a sort of gated community. Generally new hybrid
urbanity is emerging, where the dominant building type is a double storey development.
The observance of this double storey construction seems to be an agreed silent rule
223
among the settlers; developments beyond two stories are vehemently resisted through
demolitions.
The transformations in Buru Buru show that; transformations can be used as an
urbanisation strategy, where settlements are designed for transformations to occur over
time. This will entail the development (design) of various building typologies that can be
extended or modified, such that a coherent whole can be achieved during the
consolidation period. This strategy will make better use of resources by maximising on
the investment potential, and minimising conflicts among settlers. Diverse informalities
have shown that the deficiency in urban structures, make people create alternative
strategies for survival. No system can be entirely perfect, however for sustainable urban
development to occur; urban structures should enable residents to pursue their individual
livelihoods.
Urban Integration
Commissioner Charles Eliot, in 1900 believed that with European settlement, the Kenya
colony would be profitable in ten years, based upon a policy of integrated and not
separate development (Hirst, 1994). This vision was however swiftly changed, and
separate development established as policy on the advent of the first European settlers.
This was the beginning of social, economic and political exclusion of Africans in matters
affecting the colony. At that time, all Africans who were not in European employment
were
building
subsistence
urbanisation
through
independent
informal
sector
development, without the benefit of Town Planning, and thereby creating the beginnings
of informality. Although these subsistence settlements provided jobs for many Africans,
Nairobi’s European citizenry had long viewed these settlements as havens of disease and
criminality, and advocated for their demolitions. In addition to the above conditions, from
the beginning, Nairobi was designed around personalised transport; starting with horses,
bicycles then rickshaws and finally the motor car ruled (Hirst, 1994; Nevanlinna, 1996).
These colonial conditions were good ground for the propagation of a segregated city.
Urban integration could only occur if all the socio-economic and political structures were
overhauled.
224
At independence, Nairobi inherited a multicultural society in which privileges had been
unevenly divided; the density distribution was uneven based on race and social status,
education and healthcare were similarly segregated. The most striking aspect of colonial
urbanisation was the logic of partitioning urban space into two zones. The “European
zone” and the “Indigenous zone”, in the case of Nairobi, there was a third “Asian zone”,
making the colonial city heterogeneous and segregated. According to Home, 1983, the
physical separation of colonial from traditional urban forms created “twin cities” in
symbiotic relationship. These twin cities in turn created parallel governance structures;
“Native” and “European” based on the colonial logic of indirect rule (Myers, 2003).
After 50 years of colonial rule, there was a chance to create a new colonial city, when a
multidisciplinary team of South African consultants was commissioned to make an urban
development proposal for Nairobi. The 1948 Master Plan which was prepared by these
consultants proposed the neighbourhood as the basic planning unit. Nairobi was
subsequently divided into 50 neighbourhood units, each unit surrounded by a distributor
road (Thornton White et al. 1948). Although the proposals advocated for humanism and
neutrality on the subject of racial segregation, political and educational action continued
to advocate for segregation, and further minimised the chance for integrated urban
development. In recent times however, many urban residents seem to be keen on living in
situations similar to the 1948 neighbourhood unit proposal.
Urban research has shown that many slum areas in developing countries as well as inner
cities of the developed world, between 50-70% of all dwellings double as workshops and
family-based crafts and production of goods or as shops of small-scale traders. These are
not just providing housing facilities that require improvements, but are the anchoring
point of a local economy that supplies the inhabitants of the settlements with a vital
source of income.
This view was supported at a workshop of slum residents held on 11th April, 2001
in Nairobi at which they expressed the need for workplaces in their
neighbourhoods, since the majority of them had no formal employment (Syagga,
2002:6).
This expressed need is pointing towards a solution akin to the Thornton White et al. 1948
proposal, which advocated for neighbourhood units, with each unit being self-sufficient
225
with its own work places. The 1948 Master Plan also seems to have had an influence in
the planning of Buru Buru, as the central communal space for social amenities is similar
to the neighbourhood unit proposal.
Master Planning as a development control tool has not been used for purposes of urban
integration. In Nairobi like elsewhere, it has been used as a political tool to maintain the
status quo, where the small ruling elite continue to benefit from the uneven distribution of
resources. The 1973 MGS was a tool for state intervention which further enhanced
segregated development. It supported the interests of the hegemonic class alliance of the
local bourgeoisie and the MNCs. The interests of the urban majority were neglected in a
similar way as was done by the three preceding colonial plans. Segregation was now
based on economic and class lines as opposed to the racial and class lines previously
used. The use of functionalism in the MGS, as an expression of universal human values
as perceived by the MNCs, was a technical justification for continued segregation.
There are many variables that can be used for urban integration, urban transport is one
variable among others. In Nairobi however, this has never been addressed, from the early
days of personalised private transport, public transport is still privatised even today. The
dominant matatu mode of transport does not work for the common good, and a concerted
effort must be made to create a viable public transport system that can support urban
integration. Nairobi’s demographic data shows that more than one million people who
live in informal settlements are marginalised. They benefit little from urban services yet
they contribute to the city economy, even if insignificantly, their plight needs to be
addressed if any meaningful integration has to take place. This could be achieved by
creating a public transport system that is all inclusive.
On the other hand, Nairobi’s full potential as a viable economic, industrial and political
hub in East Africa can only be achieved if policies of integration are adopted. From a
legal perspective, the illegal city should be accommodated within the legal city if reality
on the ground is to be reflected in law, because the credibility of the law will be seriously
undermined if the majority of the citizens are classed as illegal (Mitullah and Kibwana in
Fernandes and Varley, 1998:191)
The inquiry into urban space has dealt with the issue of urban integration, and has
identified the shortcomings of regularisation which has interpreted integration in a
226
shallow way; as a legal and fiscal category. Castells’ argument (Castells, 1983) on the
idea of citizenship is a good starting point in considering what integration should mean.
For Castells, the idea of citizenship should mean, belonging to a city. In this study I
consider integration to mean, the possibility of having equal opportunity to jobs,
transportation, leisure, health and educational services. This position has also been taken
by Castillo in his study in 2000, who further observed that;
The success of any urban policy will depend on the ability to recognise
integration as the mechanism for people to overcome their conditions of poverty
(Castillo, 2000:147).
Diverse Informalities as a tool for understanding the urbanisation process in Nairobi has
been based on the assumption that the lessons learnt from informal urbanisation can help
improve the city. Empirical evidence shows that diverse informalities have generated
some creative solutions to the problems of urbanity in circumstances of limited resources.
The spatial framework adopted for diverse informalities rather than legal or sociological
lenses, allows designers (planners/architects) to address urban issues in a more
comprehensive way by establishing a continuum, from policy to plan to project. Policies
of informal urbanisation should concentrate on preserving scarce resources and
minimising adverse impacts of development.
A critique of Regularisation Policies
The regularisation policy has remained functional for some time, although it has the
potential of creating large areas that while legal, will remain sub-urbanised. Settlements
where most residents have acquired legal title to land and fiscally integrated may have the
same developmental deficiencies as places without the legal title. This brings into focus
the need for a holistic approach to city making as opposed to regularisation which in
effect is urbanisation by decree. The dominant arguments against regularisation are that
regularisation will foster continuous informal urbanisation, and secondly, it is based on
the fear that by incorporating informal areas into the formal regime, the poorer settlers
will be further pushed out into the fringe to start the informal cycle all over again.
Although regularisation and the cost recovery money paid by settlers to obtain services
and infrastructure serve an important purpose, regularisation is flawed in many respects.
227
Firstly, it does not address the needs of the poor to help them overcome poverty, and is
considered as a “handout” to the poor, which far from serving their interests, ultimately
limits their ability to change. Secondly, regularisation remains a reactive policy without
any strategic role in defining goals, policies or scenarios. It is more concerned with
damage control than with actual transformation of the urbanisation process. Thirdly, by
focusing on the issue of land tenure, regularisation ignores the most important aspects of
development, which should facilitate access to jobs, services and opportunities.
The fact that regularisation has become such a strong policy represents a decision by the
state to choose this modality of planning and social policy over others, such as facilitating
people’s access to serviced land or housing by providing land reserves. This choice in
policy has been informed by the political benefits of regularisation. As opposed to other
modalities of planning, regularisation has a “high-impact” political effect. It allows the
state to keep the poor faithful to the system and to selectively and centrally administer
social welfare. It additionally minimises the conflict among stakeholders by eliminating
the notion of fraud, wrongdoing and conflict.
The regularisation process appears as a conciliatory gesture rather than an
application of the law (Azuela, 1989 in Castillo, 2000:93).
Informal processes happen with the full knowledge of the state; from the government’s
tolerance of illegal sales and subdivisions, to the painless regularisation process, the
authorities recognise that informal developers fill in a social void. Not only is urban law
negotiated among stakeholders, but even worse, urbanity is granted by “decree”.
This is probably one of the most unfortunate costs of informal urbanisation for
settlers and society. Residents are forced to invest more in political actions and
lobbying than in productive activities that would improve their economic and
social conditions (Castillo, 2000:38)
The Role of Design in Settlements
What is the role of design in contemporary urban processes? The current circumstances
in most third world cities demand that design mediates between various actors in the
urbanisation process i.e. public sector, private sector and individuals. The complexity of
contemporary society, particularly in a context of informality requires the services of a
228
professional who can priotise and articulate the competing needs of settlement
requirements. In recent times, the role of design has increasingly become marginalised in
informal urbanisation, while social scientists have played a much bigger role in this
process. It is indeed time for design to once again take its rightful position in this process.
In Nairobi today, almost 60% of the population lives in informal settlements, these
settlements which form part of the urban space are produced informally. If designers
(architects and planners) are keen on discussing urban space, how can they ignore this
large proportion of the city that is creating urban space?
In many third world cities, poor people normally act by example, which creates an
opportunity for design intervention, by way of developing solutions that go beyond the
functional requirements of the urban poor. These solutions should take cognisance of the
social, economic, political and cultural dynamics of the city. From a historical
perspective, Ildefons Cerda`, 1855, in Barcelona attempted to deal with the issue of
prototype. He developed two types of urban blocks (minimum urbs), for the middle class
and the workers Fig. 6.2. He went further and proposed a grid system incorporating
circulation networks that were required to support these blocks. Contemporary design in
third world cities needs to adopt this kind of holistic approach.
Cerda`s minimum urb eventually became the European “urban prototype”. This block
was basically an amalgam of several lots that created a block with possibilities of having
frontages on all four sides. It offered each individual lot in the amalgam street frontage,
making the block fairly democratic. Contrary to this, the colonial urban block developed
for Nairobi was an individual lot measuring 50´x100´ (15mx30m) for commercial lots
and about 6mx20m for middle income residential lots. This typology affords the lot a
street frontage on only one side, unless it is a corner lot. In the Buru Buru courtyard
layout, where courtyards can be back to back, some lots end up having no street frontage
Fig.6.3. The lack of a street front in some lots in the Buru Buru typology deprives these
lots the possibility of engaging in commercial activities, which are more viable on street
fronts. To some extent, the Buru Buru layout also creates a fire risk as it has limited exit
routes; it also presents servicing problems for services that may run at the back of lots.
229
Fig.6.2, Cerda`s Minimum Urb
The European block was built up to the plot boundary, which made it possible to
articulate the urban edge. Over the years transformations have taken place in the
courtyard space, originally designed as an internal garden, but the urban edge has
remained pretty much the same in the last 130 years. There was no possibility of defining
the urban edge in Buru Buru, because of the 6-9m building set back, which only created
room for later day ad-hoc transformations. The proliferation of transformations on built
forms and open spaces is due to the fact that these spatial configurations are inadequate in
satisfying people’s needs. According to De Soto, 2001 in order to satisfy people’s needs,
extralegal transformations evolve over time until they are barely distinguishable from
property that is perfectly legal. This process seems to have some merit, and is the
responsibility of designers to anticipate these dynamics by creating the necessary
frameworks that will enable these transformations to occur.
230
Fig.6.3, Typical Buru Buru Courtyard Layout
Fig.6.4 illustrates how design intervention could have anticipated the transformation
process. In this regard, De Soto argues that;
By bringing the extralegal sector inside the law, an opportunity will be opened up
for massive low-cost housing programmes that will provide the poor homes that
are not only better built but much cheaper than what they themselves have been
building in the extralegal sector (De Soto, 2001:205).
The study model in chapter two also showed that the majority of the population in third
world cities operate in the informal sector. This reality by itself presents an opportunity
for professional design intervention.
Turner in Burgess et al, 1997 argues that the role of the architect/planner is to mediate
between global sustainable development and participatory development at neighbourhood
level, while allowing grater autonomy to communities. On the other hand Rossi, 1982
recognised the work of Carlo Aymonino, who envisaged the end of zoning.
The end of the system of horizontal usage (zoning provisions), and by the usage
with purely volumetric-quantitative building utilisation. The architectural section
231
then became one of the governing images; the generating nucleus of the entire
composition (Rossi, 1982:118).
Aymonino’s concept actually envisaged the death of naïve functionalism; zoning,
form/function relationship. I agree with this concept and further emphasise that in
mediating between various urban actors, the role of design will be to negotiate with the
various actors and create this relevant architectural section.
Fig.6.4, Sections - Professional Intervention
The role of visual attributes in design and therefore city making can not be overlooked.
Visual attributes play a major role in constituting identities, as the city according to
Rossi, 1982, is composed of monuments and artefacts which are mostly a visual
phenomenon. This visual phenomenon requires articulation through design. In Nairobi,
most upgrading projects put emphasis on regularisation and infrastructural services, and
more or less disregard the design of the dwelling units, resulting in a nondescript urban
fabric.
Empirical evidence has shown that local artisans use alternative materials in building the
extensions in the study corridor. For example they consistently use A-frame timber truss
232
system, the question is why do they do so? This may be because local fundis have no
exposure to other technologies and construction systems. In the Buru Buru case, the
original roofing was made of clay tiles laid on hollow pot maxi span slabs. This
technology works efficiently when applied through mass production, and is therefore not
appropriate to individual transformers who operate at their own pace. It was noticed also
that rather than use clay tiles they prefer concrete tiles, which are easier to lay. This is a
situation where design intervention, can facilitate technology transfer and in the process
create enhanced built forms Fig.6.5.
The building type, currently being generated in the study corridor is creating a potential
dangerous wind tunnel. It has also reduced the privacy and visual comfort of the original
buildings this could have been avoided through design. The transformations in the study
corridor are re-defining the urban edge by reframing the relationship between the
container and the contained, the inside and the outside, which contravene the colonial
logic of spatial order. They in effect are creating a more urban prototype and thereby
urbanising the original suburban prototype. In this case the transformers are taking the
lead in defining appropriate laws on the ground, which the city authorities should
consider for incorporation in the formal statutes. The American pre-emptive law of 1830
is a good example of how to formalise informal practices (De Soto, 2001).
From the foregoing, it is evident that although informality is practiced across all social
categories of Nairobi’s residents, the three main categories would require different spatial
design interventions Fig.6.6. For low income settlements, allowance should be made to
accommodate Home Based Enterprises, while high income settlements do not require
provision for HBEs. Alexander’s Peru competition proposal, where he developed the
“Generic House” (Houses generated by patterns, 1969) is a case in point.
233
Fig.6.5, Sections - Design Options
234
Fig.6.6, Layout and Sections-Design Options (For Various Income Groups)
235
8. APPENDICES
Appendix 1: Nairobi City Area – Case Study Locations
248
Appendix 2: Other Images of Nairobi
Railway Station 1901
Kibera, Laini-Saba
Railway Station 2005
Un-grassed Open Ground
Middle Income Gated Housing - Kilimani
249
Nairobi CBD Skyline
Nairobi’s Glass Towers
Yaya Centre – Shopping Mall
250
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