The book, Nairobi in the Making: Landscapes of Time and Urban Belonging, explores the incremental processes of working through uncertain times and making place in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. It focusses on the way the residents of Nairobi maneuver between different spatial, political and temporal scales through self-initiatives. Aspirations of Vision 2030, a National plan that promises to place Nairobi as a world-class metropolis by the year 2030 dominates the discourse of the book, highlighting individual attempts of progress as a way of connecting to a future that seems to be near at hand yet far from reach. By exploring the unrealised plans of Vision 2030 the book discusses the situations in which urbanites are left hanging between a promise of modernity and a slow progress of development.
The research is based on the livelihoods of residents in a historical neighbourhood called Kaloleni, said to be the first officially planned neighbourhood that was provided for ‘Africans’ by the colonial government during the British colonial rule in Kenya. The neighbourhood is in proximity to Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD) with many residents being of low income.
The book begins with an introduction that reveals the neglect of duty of care and maintenance by the Nairobi County Council (NCC), then referred to as the City Council. For this review and to keep up to date with the current changes, NCC is used instead of the former City Council. When Kenya gained its independence from the British colonial government, duties of maintenance of the residential neighbourhood of Kaloleni were handed over to the NCC who took up responsibility for several years but for unknown reasons suddenly ceased. The residents of Kaloleni continue to pay their monthly rent to the NCC, however, many have taken up individual efforts to repair their houses and some have erected semi-permanent structures to generate additional rental income. These efforts have created a sense of ownership of the houses among the neighbourhood residents, who even propose that the initial arrangement of residence was to incrementally acquire ownership of the houses from the NCC after several years of rent payment.
The book brings out various aspects that shape and re-shape the development of the neighbourhood as it finds its place within a rapidly growing and urbanizing city. One of the dominant aspects is the anxiety of exclusion resulting from the lack of transparency of future national plans such as Vision 2030 and lack of resident involvement. The vision 2030 directly affects the neighbourhood of Kaloleni, who live their daily lives in divided hopes and fears – hope for a better urban living and fear of exclusion.
The second aspect is the processes through which a city takes shape through everyday experiences, activities and processes of individuals within their neighbourhood. The uncertainty of the future affects the management of everyday life especially when national plans such as Vision 2030 take time to materialise. The repeated acts of home maintenance and management that residents have undertaken in the absence of state provision expresses the residents attempt of breaking into the schemes of vision 2030 to create a future that is tangible to themselves.
With this setting, the book continues to explore these aspects in depth in two parts: Present Pasts, Uncertain Futures as the first part and Making New Horizons as the second part. Each part is comprised of three sections and then an overall conclusion.
This first section the book explains the everyday realities of people in Kaloleni, their efforts to care for their homes where the government has failed to take up its responsibility of maintenance and upgrading of the houses for its residents. The author characterises this section with reflection of the past by current residents, where the maintenance of the houses during and shortly after the colonial period seemed more orderly. The present neglect by the NCC has resulted in individual attempts by residents to reconstruct their own houses. The existing low-density architecture of Kaloleni, characterised by run-down buildings appears as a neighbourhood that has been stuck in time when Nairobi has continued to densify and proliferate multi-storey structures.
The author portrays what I call a residential complex where the urban residents in Kaloleni aspire for a future home in their rural areas but at the same time feel a strong sense of belonging to their home in the city. The connection of residence and cultural practices creates this complexity where some, especially the younger generations living in Kaloleni, feel caught between making their life in the city but required to ensure a continuity of a life in the rural areas. Many of the older residents consider their home in Nairobi as a temporary space of existence in hope for relocating to an alternative home in the rural areas.
Although the neighbourhood of Kaloleni is characterised by run-down buildings, dirt in public spaces due to failed initiatives of the NCC to collect garbage and poorly maintained roads that accumulate mud on rainy days, the memories and stories of the past are attached to this physical or material structure. The author views the neighbourhood, not as a decaying part of the city but as a space that is characterized by self-initiatives that bring a sense of continuity and a refusal to die and be forgotten.
Decay is presented by the author as a process of accumulation of materials that make up the urban fabric as opposed to a slow erosion of the past. The historical materials enable an encounter with the past that can be recognized in the present. The attempts of the residents to make a livelihood amid dirt and neglect has defined their own spaces through reconversion of the past as a continuity into an uncertain future.
The first section of the second part of the book Making New Horizons gives an account of the connections that most urban residents in Kaloleni have with their rural homes, caught in a transition between living in the city and a mind that is fixed on a future in a rural home. The author uses an example of the cultural traditions of the Luo community, who make up the largest number of residents in Kaloleni, to explain this kind of transitioning. Although some sections that give details about the cultural life of the Luo are unnecessary, most of the information frames the understanding of the association of the city as a place of present opportunity to make for a future in a rural home. The savings accrued from urban labour are invested in rural households where many seek to retire.
An interesting connection between security and exclusion is explained in the second section of this part that is titled Constructing Security Claims. The author discusses the link between security and colonial practices where contemporary attempts to manage urban security both explicitly and implicitly draw on older colonial practises of securing the city through exclusive places. The practices are still present in Nairobi’s built environment, where private malls, fenced off houses and gated communities create exclusionary enclaves, that do not directly manage security but rather index prestige. This is also carried on to the national plans such as Vision 2030 that promises securitised exclusivity on a larger scale.
The lavish neighbourhoods that are privately operated carefully cultivate exclusivity. Security then becomes accessible only to those with the capacity to buy into protective services or to a residential enclave. Exclusionary enclaves characterise the aspiration to modernity given that similar architectural and landscape characteristics are desired by both the low and middle-class and upcoming residential houses sell security in form of secure and digitized access to apartments, inadvertently inviting further exclusion.
In the third and final section of this part the author explains how residents of other neighbourhoods near Kaloleni make their livelihoods and try to secure their future in the shadow of Vision 2030. Although the examples that are used to show how digitalization connects with the aspirations of Vision 2030 are not very clear, the general understanding of the perception of Vision 2030 allows for an open-ended approach to the effect that the plan has on the urban residents and how they position themselves in the future promise of a world-class city.
The book concludes by wrapping up the hopes of vision 2030 as they manifest in the present and how individuals attempt to bring themselves closer to the desired vision of 2030. The residents of Nairobi do not envision the promises of the plan as a fixed destination but rather, through their everyday attempts of making and remaking the city, seek to influence its emergent shape.
In summary, Constance Smith presents an ethnographic view of how a colossal number of Nairobi’s residents, despite living in a state of impermanence, make efforts to curve out a livelihood and a future amid uncertainties. Although the livelihood of the residents of Kaloleni does not reflect the perspective of all residents in the city, they represent a large group of Nairobi’s urban poor, whose day-to-day livelihoods are characterized by hopes- and fears - in an immaterial urban future. Researchers interested in understanding urban development from an ethnographic lens will find inspiration in the different perspectives of this book as it illustrates the plea of inclusivity by the residents yearning to co-own national visions together with its bearer rather than being simply by-standers/on-lookers. In addition, the book is resourceful in understanding Nairobi from a residential historical perspective and how this history is embedded in the present urban architecture. The use of photography provides a clearer understanding to the reader of the character of the neighbourhood and the different concepts presented in the book.