Introduction
In October 2013, Amnesty International published a scathing report on forced evictions in Nairobi. The report focused on two informal settlements, ‘City Carton’, in the far west of the city, and ‘Deep Sea’, closer to the Central Business District, in the well-off Westlands area. In the case of the latter, 3000 residents were threatened with eviction to make way for ‘Missing Link 15B’, a new 1.6 kilometre road linking the new Thika Superhighway with the Limuru Road (see Figure 3). The project is funded by the European Union and is managed by the Kenya Urban Roads Authority (KURA). The residents of Deep Sea were notified by KURA in 2009 that they would be displaced by the link road and, despite meetings and enumeration exercises to work out how many people will be affected, no resettlement plan has been made available to them (Amnesty International 2013, 4). The European Union declined to address the eviction issue, stating that its ‘role was limited to financing and supervising the road construction and that responsibility for any eviction and resettlement lay with the Kenyan government’ (28). Kenya's Cabinet Secretary for Housing and Lands did not respond to Amnesty International's request for a meeting. The May 2013 demolition of City Carton, meanwhile, was supported by police officers who used force and firearms. Private individuals bearing a court order to levy distress for unpaid rent against two individuals (by confiscating moveable property) were accompanied by 170 police personnel who instead participated in the demolition of homes and the forced eviction of an estimated 400 families (see Ibid., 34).
Slum demolitions have of course long been part of ‘the repertoire of politics' (Klopp 2008, 297) in Kenya both during and since independence and are likely to increase as massive infrastructural transformations (transport corridors, ports, superhighways) come into being throughout eastern Africa (Bremner 2013). This paper takes as its starting point Klopp's important observation (2011) on road policy in Kenya that:
… despite the importance of transportation projects and policies in terms of shaping urban land, space, and quality, in general analysts, policy makers, and civil society do not always hold this sector up to the same level of political analysis and monitoring as they do for others like health, education, land or housing. Indeed, critical political, sociological, and historical analysis is more the exception than the rule, in part because theorizing around transportation and hence the kinds of questions asked tend to be overly narrow and shaped primarily by economists and engineers. (Klopp 2011, 2)
Amongst scholars, however, work is beginning to emerge that takes roads and automobility as its focus (Klaeger 2013; Lamont 2013). Much of this work is by anthropologists seeking to develop ‘ethnograph[ies] of the road’ (Lamont 2013, 368) or to explore ‘road mythographies’ (Masquelier 2002, 829) in what Klaeger (2013) has termed a ‘mobility turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (359). Earlier work (Simon 1996) had sought to examine the importance of transport for development more broadly and was rooted less in anthropological or ethnographic perspectives than in critical development theory that took state policy as its focus. Whilst drawing on both these bodies of scholarship, this paper is more closely aligned with the second body of scholarship in that it seeks to develop an explicitly political economy approach. It does this by developing a critique of Nairobi's road-building boom in order to show how road building is closely tied to claims to political authority and a long-running developmental impulse. I locate the ‘creative destruction’ (Harvey 2012, 16) associated with road building in present-day Nairobi in Kenya's ‘Vision 2030’ (Government of Kenya 2007), a document of neo-liberal master planning which functions predominantly as a political manifesto for the continued polarisation of wealth and power which has scarred the city since the colonial period (Kimani 1972; Muwonge 1980). I explore road projects as a ‘building boom for the rich’ (Harvey 2012, 12) and argue that road building constitutes not public policy for the urban majority, who walk, cycle or rely on crowded and often unsafe public transport (which is in fact privately owned) (see Anderson 2002; Branch 2011; Ference 2011), but an opportunity for patronage, speculative profits and authoritarian planning based on the ideal of individual car ownership or ‘autopia’ (Ballard 1970). Critical geography has alerted us to the importance of studying the relationship between space and social relations (Blomley, Delaney, and Ford 2001). In this paper, I offer a reading of contemporary infrastructural change in Nairobi as being simultaneously the paternalistic legacy of a gerontocracy (Murunga 2006) and the next act in a long-running drama about the mastery of the city, an act in which we witness Nairobi transformed into a modern ‘techno-pastoral garden’ (Berman 1982, 27).
This paper also has a more normative aim. McAuslan (2013) has argued that outside South Africa, there has been little attempt to conceptualise a right to the African city. I use road building and the related threats of forced eviction as a lens through which to explore the prospects of a right to the city in Kenya. At present, there is ‘still an unwillingness to accept that the urban poor have any right to the city’ (232). Forced evictions to make way for road building such as those documented by Amnesty International confirm McAuslan's (2007, 178) description of the ‘the bulldozer as the principal tool of planning’. If, as Harvey (2012, 136) has written, the right to the city is ‘an empty signifier full of immanent but not transcendent possibilities’ and ‘everything depends on who gets to fill the signifier with revolutionary as opposed to reformist immanent meaning,’ what might be the content of a right to the African city, given the colonial state's deep mistrust, not to say fear, of the urban (Kimani 1972) and the wholesale adoption of this perspective at independence (McAuslan 2013)? How might a political economy approach to contemporary infrastructure projects assist us in thinking about the content of a right to the city?
The paper is organised as follows. In the next section, I show how road building on a grand scale is inaugurated by Vision 2030 and the project to transform Kenya into a middle-income economy by that date. Widely viewed, like the rule of law, as an ‘unqualified human good’ (Thompson 1975, 266), Kenya's road building is closely linked to an ‘Africa Rising’ narrative, which has been embraced for quite different, and indeed contradictory reasons, by multilateral and bilateral donors, the African Union and Kenya itself. In section three, I show how the return to road building, which has its roots in the colonial era but which was rediscovered in earnest when the Kibaki government came to power in 2002, is an attempt to assert political authority derived from a longstanding developmentalist impulse, one in which private accumulation and spectacular public works go hand in hand, and in which ‘the economy of wealth-accumulation piggy-backs violently on the economy of dispossession’ (Harvey 2012, 25). In section four, and in light of these massive infrastructural transformations, I begin to develop a conceptualisation of the right to the city and argue that what is needed is a radical understanding of the city and its potentialities that wrests control of ‘a right to the city’ away from a bureaucratic vision, and instead adopts a critical political economy approach in order to imbue the idea with collective meaning.
Autopia: Nairobi's road-building boom
In June 2008, President Kibaki launched Vision 2030, a development programme to transform Kenya into a newly industrialising, middle-income country. Enthusiastically embraced by the Kenyatta government on its election in 2013, Vision 2030 is referred to by some commentators as ‘the real Constitution of Kenya’.1 The aim of the master plan is to set out how Kenya will achieve middle-income status by 2030. Organised under three pillars, economic, political and social, Vision 2030 states that a key element of Kenya's growth strategy is infrastructure development. There are overlapping and contradictory external and internal drivers of the infrastructural transformation contained in Vision 2030. Amongst international financial institutions such as the World Bank, infrastructural improvements are cited as critical to the country's aim of reaching middle-income status by 2030. According to the World Bank (Briceño-Garmenda and Shkaratan 2011, 1), ‘In the past decade, infrastructure contributed 0.5 percentage points to Kenya's annual per capita GDP growth. Raising the country's infrastructure endowment to that of Africa's middle-income countries could increase that contribution by 3 percentage points.’ Although this assessment relates to the power sector, airports, Mombasa Port and access to the Internet as well as to roads, it is clear that the World Bank views road building and maintenance as central to Kenya's growth strategy (Figure 1).
Vision 2030 can be also be located firmly within a ubiquitous narrative of ‘Africa Rising’, which is expressed both externally (see Dowden 2013; The Economist 2013) and within Kenya and the wider region as part of the country's contemporary anti-imperialist turn. President Uhuru's indictment before the International Criminal Court (ICC), Kenya's newfound status at the centre of the African Union and China's growing role on the continent have resulted in the forging of a powerful narrative of future growth and economic transformation, as well as political self-assertion. Kenyatta's (2013) address to the African Union, decrying the support of the West for the ICC, sets an anti-colonial narrative of Africa's rise against ‘the spectacle’ of an enfeebled post-imperial West:
The philosophies, ideologies, structures and institutions that visited misery upon millions for centuries ultimately harm their perpetrators. Thus the imperial exploiter crashes into the pits of penury. The arrogant world police is crippled by shambolic domestic dysfunction. These are the spectacles of Western decline we are witnessing today. At the same time, other nations and continents rise and prosper. Africa and Asia continue to thrive, with their promise growing every passing day. (Kenyatta 2013)
I will return below to the ideas of spectacle, growth and promise so richly captured in this passage. Before that, I set out the place of the Thika Superhighway project in Vision 2030. Previously a dual carriageway known as the Thika Road, the new Thika Superhighway is one of Kenya's most important infrastructure projects. It has been widely presented as a prerequisite to further megaprojects across the country, such as the Lamu Port-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor, which aims to link Kenya to South Sudan and Ethiopia through roads, rail and pipelines (Bremner 2013). Located in the northeast of the Nairobi Metropolitan Region, the Superhighway runs from Nairobi city centre to Thika District. Historically, the road has been one of Kenya's primary cargo routes linking the city to the wider region, reaching as far as Moyale in Ethiopia, and has, as a result, been classified as an international trunk road (A2). Along its route, the Thika Road passes through a number of significant satellite towns to Nairobi, including Ruaraka, Kasarani, Kiambu Town, Githurai, Ruiru, Juja and Thika itself (Figure 2).
Klopp (2011) has identified three important features of the Thika Superhighway project. First, its management is fragmented among a range of agencies. The government agencies in charge of the Thika Highway Improvement Project are the Ministry of Roads, which is in charge of the overall coordination of the project, and the Kenya National Highways Authority, which is responsible for the oversight of the Improvement Project. Second, the approach to planning and designing the project has been dominated by technical experts. Klopp has pointed out that there is a widely held belief that roads and planning are to be left to technical experts, with the result that consultation with those affected by the project has been severely limited. Third, external donors have played an important role in promoting and funding the project. For road construction and rehabilitation, 56% of the finance between 2003 and 2008 came from external grants and loans from donors including prominently the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Union and, increasingly, the Chinese government. These three features result in a less than participative approach to road projects in Kenya. As Klopp notes:
… donors work with the Ministries of Finance, Roads, Transport and Public Works to make decisions on transport planning, and they negotiate on contracts to do planning, feasibility studies, engineering design and road construction. (Klopp 2011, 10)
For Klopp, the availability of aid for investing in road infrastructure explains the growing bias towards building roads. A large part of recent budget expenditures in Kenya, steadily rising each year, and the bulk of transportation expenditures are given over to roads (Ibid.).
There have been very few criticisms of recent road-building projects and specifically of the Thika Superhighway project (KARA 2012). Those that have been voiced relate to faults in the design of the road, including the propensity of the road itself as well as its flyovers and bridges to flood and the inadequacy of provision for pedestrians (KARA 2012; Thika Road Blog 2012). These criticisms were the main focus of discussions at a panel discussion on the Thika Superhighway Improvement Project that I attended at the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi in November 2012 (Makajuma 2012). Such objections are of course important both because they identify material threats to users (Melnick 2011) and because they begin the important task of challenging the assumption of risk acceptance made by planners and engineers. In this regard, Ballard's (1973) observation that design which would be treated as criminally negligent in other fields seems to be accepted in relation to the car seems to apply more broadly to the design of roads themselves. The other main criticism of the Thika Superhighway project has been that it evidences an ongoing ethnic chauvinism or what scholars such as Burgess et al. (2009), investigating the ‘political economy of road placement in Kenya’ (2), have called ‘ethno-favouritism’. Central Province, the stronghold of the Kibaki government, has gained predominantly from the new infrastructure (Hornsby 2012) (Figures 3 and 4).
The ‘Missing Link’ road that threatens to displace residents of the Deep Sea settlement is one of the last pieces of the Thika Superhighway development. Despite Constitutional provisions on the right to adequate housing and a significant High Court ruling relating to eviction, the government has not stated its position on potential evictions relating to the link road. In Satrose Ayuma and Others. vs. The Registered Trustees of the Kenya Railways Staff Retirement Benefit Scheme and Others in the High Court of Kenya at Nairobi (Petition No. 65 of 2010), the court directed the government to develop an appropriate legal framework for evictions based on internationally acceptable guidelines and urged parliament to enact legislation to address forced evictions and security of tenure.2 In his judgment, Lenaola J. took the opportunity further to develop the nascent Kenyan jurisprudence on progressive realisation of social and economic rights (Harrington 2014) invoking ‘Wanjiku’, the ordinary citizen or everywoman of Kenya's new Constitution, and attempting to build on an earlier judgment by Ngugi J., as follows:
As regards the realization of the right to adequate housing, [the State] must move with speed and establish policies and guidelines to ensure that this right is progressively realised … [and] spearhead the development of a comprehensive housing programme that is within the available resources. I believe this would be crucial in enabling the State to meet and fulfill its obligations to ensure that adequate housing is accessible to all regardless of their economic status in the society. Three years after the promulgation of the Constitution, the right to adequate housing cannot be aspirational and merely speculative. It is a right which has crystallized and which the State must endeavour to realise. It is time ‘Wanjiku’ had a decent roof over her head and so I agree with the sentiments of Mumbi Ngugi, J. in Mitubell Welfare Society vs Attorney General and 2 Others (Petition No.164 of 2011) where she stated thus: ‘The argument that social economic rights cannot be claimed at this point, two years after the promulgation of the Constitution, also ignores the fact that no provision of the Constitution is intended to wait until the State feels it is ready to meet its constitutional obligations. Article 21 and 43 require that there should be “progressive realization” of social economic rights, implying that the State must begin to take steps, and I might add, be seen to take steps, towards realization of these rights.’ (Republic of Kenya 2013)
In the case of Deep Sea, as the Amnesty International report (2013) clearly shows, no one appears to be prepared to take responsibility for the threatened displacement. In contrast, the Kenya Urban Roads Authority has very good relations with the residents of prosperous Muthaiga, Nairobi's diplomatic quarter and one of its wealthiest suburbs, which will also be affected by the link road between Thika and Limuru Roads. KURA is regularly invited to, and attends, the meetings of the Residents' Association and has provided assurances that the link road will ‘not inconvenience house-owners’ (Muthaiga Residents’ Association 2012). The mobilisation of Muthaiga's residents in response to the proposed road stands in stark contrast to the struggles of those in Deep Sea also affected by the new road. As Harvey (2008, 32) reminds us in a different context, ‘the defence of property values becomes of such paramount political interest that, as Mike Davis points out, the home-owner associations in the state of California become bastions of political reaction, if not of fragmented neighbourhood fascisms’ (see Davis 2006, 32).
No one living in and travelling around Nairobi can remain indifferent to the ‘vicious local impacts on urban life’ (Harvey 2012, 13) that the grand infrastructure projects of recent years have entailed. In the next section, I argue that the road-building boom must be understood by reference to struggles for political authority and to an abiding project of development as spectacle.
King of the road: infrastructure, spectacle and political authority
Historically, road building in Kenya has taken place intermittently. At independence in 1963, the extensive (untarred or murram) road network developed by the British colonial authorities, primarily to extract primary agricultural products and to facilitate a settler economy, was improved by bituminisation by the responsible ministry, the Ministry of Works. Few new roads were built (see Hornsby 2012). The early 1970s then witnessed new road building by the Kenyatta government, with mileage increasing by 28% between 1970 and 1974 (Ibid.). As in the present day, decisions on road building were considered to be tied to ethnic favouritism, with roads being improved in Central Province (the heartland of the independence KANU government) at the expense of Kenya's other regions, including the north. The mid 1970s inaugurated the poor safety record and reputation for road carnage for which the country is now infamous. Indeed, by 2002, when the Kibaki government came to power, Kenya had one of the highest rates of road accidents per vehicle in the world and the always-skeletal public transport system had collapsed. Private bus companies and private minibuses (known as matatus), many of which are owned by Kenya's politicians and businessmen, controlled transportation and commuter routes ‘in a complex and little-regulated network of informal employment, collective self-help and criminal gangs’ (Hornsby 2012, 645; see also Mutongi 2006). Furthermore, rampant corruption relating to procurement and to the awarding of road-building contracts during the Moi era was well known. Kenyans were apt to point to unfinished roads and explain to visitors that they had been ‘eaten’ (Harrington and Manji 2013; Wrong 2009). In the absence of programmes and funding for maintenance, Kenya's road infrastructure deteriorated dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s (Burgess et al. 2009). Traffic congestion, fatal accidents and deteriorating safety came to characterise Kenya's roads.
This is the historic context in which Kenya's present-day roads boom must be understood. In part, the efforts of the Kibaki government to develop a demonstrable record of successful road building after it was elected in 2002 can be explained by its desire to distinguish itself from the Moi regime's road corruption and infrastructural incompetence. From 2002, the new government projected itself as a reliable modernising force even as it quickly became mired in gigantic corruption scandals of its own, most notably the Anglo-Leasing scandal (see Wrong 2009). The proposal to build the Thika Superhighway to replace a dual carriageway into the central province was key to the government's developmental agenda. In her work on road traffic accidents in Kenya, Melnick (2011) has argued that ideas of mobility and modernity are connected in contemporary Kenya so that road building is considered ‘the most important of infrastructural investments, measuring economic development in tarmac and figuring aspirations to global membership in the construction of East Africa's first “superhighway”’ (4). As Simon (1996) has shown, this has been an enduring feature of modernisation.
In this regard, parallels can be drawn between the developmentalist impulse of the Kibaki government and the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, which, under Erdoğan, ‘has used infrastructure projects (both large and small) to both ground their political authority and to naturalise a particular project of generating value’ (Hammond and Angell 2013). For analysts of the protests at Taksim Square in 2013, the AKP's enduring appeal can be explained by its success in linking its success with ‘the transformation of the built environment’ to meet the needs of a rising nation. Just as ‘ the AKP's success has been grounded upon what might be termed a performance of (infra)structures’ (Ibid.) so in Kenya, the Kibaki government's ‘motion sculptures’ (Ballard 1970, 108) – the flyovers, bridges and multi-lane highways that have come into being in recent years – are evidence that the government recognises ‘the value of ongoing public work as public spectacle’ (Berman 1982, 300). A document of master planning, Vision 2030 invites us by its name to consider the ‘well-established argument, from feminists but not only from feminists, that modernism both privileged vision over the other senses and established a way of seeing from the point of view of an authoritative, privileged, and male, position’ (Massey 1994, 232, author's italics). Travelling around Nairobi during the building of the flyovers and bridges near the National Museum of Kenya and University of Nairobi, it was not uncommon to see groups of people, including university students, whose campus ‘is being severed from the city core by the current highway construction’ (Klopp 2011, 15), watching the ongoing works, the heavy lifting equipment seeming to embody the virility and hard work being done by the state on behalf of its spectator-citizens. The aim, it seemed, during the long-drawn-out digging, traffic rerouting, congestion and noise – and in the face of ‘the moral complexity of establishing the infrastructures as a “public good”’ (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012, 460) rather than evidence of ethno-patronage (Burgess et al. 2009) – was to keep ‘the public enthralled’ (Berman 1982, 300).
The infrastructural capitalism of recent years has sought to show a developing nation under authoritative leadership. Murunga (2006) has argued that politics in Kenya is characterised by a powerful gerontocratic impulse. Musila (2010), taking this analysis further, has written that ‘at the core of Kenyan social imaginaries across the cultural, political and intellectual landscapes, lies a particular trope of veneration of both age and masculinity’ (281). If the title ‘Mzee’ given to Kenya's first president, Kenyatta, inaugurated this veneration of age and the ‘framing of state power’ as ‘gerontocratic masculinity’ (282), Kibaki's assumption of the presidency aged over 80 continued this gerontocratic ideal. Passed from father (1963–1978) to symbolic uncle (2002–2013) to son (2013 to the present), the presidency stood ‘at the helm of the nation-homestead’ (282). The stewardship that can be provided only by the male head of a family has since 2002 resulted in the development of the nation through massive infrastructural projects. For anyone alert to sexual politics in contemporary Kenya (Kenny 2013; Thomas 2003; Wanyeki 2008), the road-building boom signals ‘an aggressive virility’ (Lefebvre 1991, 302; see also Butler 2012) in the service of development. In this context, it is no coincidence that Kenya's rich vocabulary of transgressive (but determinedly hetero-) sexuality is constructed around cars and roads. Kenya's airwaves, liberalised since the 1990s and committed (or cowed into) an uncritical, if not sycophantic, stance (Gathara 2013), avoid political talk and are instead awash with early morning talk shows which by turns celebrate and villify ‘spare wheels’, roadside affairs and mpango wa kando (a side arrangement, lit. a bit on the side).
Along with the Superhighway has come spectacular ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2012, 55). The construction of the Thika Superhighway ‘took a meat axe’ (17) to Gathurai market in Ruiru, scattering market traders supplying fresh produce to the Nairobi area and its northern reaches. Rampant land speculation along the route of the Thika Superhighway has since funnelled money into private hands. The growth of tract developments of ‘low-cost’ housing in satellite towns such as Thika, northeast of Nairobi, began even before the completion of the Superhighway. Increasingly, high-end gated communities with leisure facilities and shopping malls line the route of the Superhighway (including a new ‘Thika Road Mall’). According to the Business Daily Newspaper (November 2013), ‘the construction of the Thika superhighway and proximity to Nairobi has made the industrial town in Kiambu County an attractive investment destination.’ Commercial lenders and private developers have partnered to provide ‘all-in’ packages to home buyers with developers negotiating ‘favourable’ terms with banks. Many of the developers' websites and pamphlets, for example, state ‘90 per cent financing available for qualified buyers’. Financing is advertised alongside properties. The likelihood of future interest rate hikes after the end of the fix, as well as the impact of rises in fuel costs and transport (to say nothing of the effects on health and family life of long commutes into Nairobi) remain unaddressed. Writing of similar tendencies in the United States, Harvey has noted how families unable to afford expensive city prices, especially in the southwest, moved to the semi-periphery of cities ‘to take up speculatively built tract housing at initially easy credit rates, but who then faced escalating commuting costs with rising oil prices and soaring mortgage payments as market-interest rates kicked in’ (13).
Related to this, automobile ownership has grown with each mile of tarmac laid. Banks offer unsecured personal loans for car purchases. Secured credit has facilitated home ownership at a significant distance from the city but with the rise in commuting into Nairobi there has also been an opportunity for commercial banks to offer unsecured personal loans to support car ownership. We witness how ‘the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere’ (Marx and Engels 1848, 38). What might be labelled ‘Thika Superhighway related indebtedness’ awaits its researchers.
To end, it is important to recognise that claims to political authority organised around road developments, which Dalakoglou and Harvey (2012, 495) have described as ‘the paradigmatic material infrastructure of the twenty-first century’, are not uncontested. Neither is accumulation achieved only by the ‘legitimate’ activities of land speculators and property developers, not least because of ‘the interrelation, or more precisely the mutual contamination, of corruption and normal capitalist accumulation’ (Harrington and Manji 2013, 1). The activities of militia groups such as Mungiki (a proscribed organisation made up of young men from the Kikuyu ethnic group; see Ruteere 2008) in controlling commuter routes and the minibuses which ply these routes are an assertion of political power, for, as Branch (2011) writes, ‘it is unquestionable that Mungiki has emerged as a shadow state in Nairobi and its surrounding areas’ (339). It is also an assertion of economic power: militias such as Mungiki extract both a start-up fee from any operator wishing to use a route controlled by the gang, and a proportion of each fare from the drivers and conductors, a cost passed on by matatu operators to their customers (Ibid.). The bourgeoisie's search for expanding markets and political authority is matched by the growing role of militias not just in ‘political contests’ (Branch 2011) but also in everyday life (Katamunga 2005). As politicians sponsor and hire militias for self-protection and in sometimes bloody contests with rivals (Branch 2011), the infrastructural landscape cannot be understood without attention to these groups, their alternative legalities and their struggle to control both space and capital.
In the next section, I explore how a right to the city might be conceptualised in the light of the ‘economic and architectural excess’ (Bremner 2013, 2) I have traced so far.
‘The atrocity exhibition’ or the right to the city?
3I now turn to a second task of this paper: to try to draw out the normative implications of my discussion of road building. I seek to do this by exploring the idea of a right to the city, an idea that has received little academic attention in the African context (McAuslan 2013) and argue that, in a evolving capitalist ‘autopia’ (Ballard 1970) where ‘new voices … are taking on the language of social justice and human rights to express changes in the political and ethical demands of the Kenyan citizenry’ (Lamont 2013, 382), a right to the city encompasses not just a claim to be in the city – itself potentially a radical collective demand given Kenya's colonial and postcolonial record of virulent anti-urbanisation that saw towns as social and political problems (Lonsdale 2001) – but also a right over the city, that is, a right to traverse and negotiate it, to ‘inhabit well’ (Purcell 2013) (Figure 5).
Crossing drainage on the Thika Highway during its construction. (I am grateful to the founder of the Thika Road Blog, Wilfred Kathugi, for permission to use this image.)
If the right to the city is a temporal demand, one that claims a right to live in the city over time, a right over the city is a spatial demand, one that lays claim to the materiality of the city and the embodied experience of everyday life in it, living in but also traversing it, making use of it (Lefebvre 1968). For Painter, Lefebvre (1968) is concerned with ‘the use-value of the city over its exchange-value, emphasizing that citizens have a right to make use of the city, and that it is not solely a collection of resources to enable economic activity’ (Painter 2005, 9; see also Amin and Thrift 2002). Harvey (2003) has written that the right to the city
is not merely a right of access to what exists, but a right to change it after our heart's desire. We need to be sure we can live with our own creations … . But the right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious of all human rights. (Harvey 2003, 236)
In recent years, amongst anthropologists and public health scholars (Azetsop 2010) in particular, there has emerged a special interest in the city, citizenship and justice. In his paper on speed governors, Lamont (2013, 375) draws on Feely and Simon's (1994) idea of ‘actuarial justice’ to explore the inequitable results of Kenya's well-known ‘road carnage’. Similarly, Geissler's (2013) work on public health workers in Kisumu is concerned with questions of justice and citizenship:
One's habitation and circulation in a city reflect and shape how (indeed, whether) one experiences the city as a civitas, and oneself as a citizen with entitlements and responsibilities. This civitas extends into multiple pasts (seen and used differently by different people), and forward by way of urban plans, visions and actions, and in the future's embodiment in urban infrastructures. (Geissler 2013, 539)
Although this scholarship has not used the language of the ‘right to the city’, they echo my concerns in this paper. Be it from a planning (Berrisford 2013; Médard 2010), legal (Fernandes 2007; McAuslan 2013) or architectural (Bremner 2013; Smith 2013) perspective, there is an increasing awareness of the need to develop critical perspectives on urbanisation (Watson 2002; Ngau 2013). Until now, for example, planning law ‘has been used in country after country to keep the urban masses at bay; to deny them lawful homes and livelihoods; to reinforce the powers of officials; and to weaken the institutions of civil society’ (McAuslan 2003, 103). As a result, planning law has been described as ‘a major fault line running through society’ (Berrisford 2013, 2).
To illustrate this, I wish to return here to the contemporary students of the University of Nairobi which I described above, watching the construction of a flyover that has had brutal effects on their campus and its connection to the city. Klopp (2011), critical of the lack of consultation surrounding road policy and construction in Kenya, has noted that the University of Nairobi was not asked to participate in plans for new roads that would have a profound impact on its campus, stranding it from the city centre on one side with the construction at Chiromo and the National Museum of a flyover and bridge to enable access onto the Thika Superhighway. Nonetheless, there appears to have been no opposition from students. This is in stark contrast to student protests over road safety around the Nairobi campus in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, in February 1963 University of Nairobi students staged a sit-in to demand that a bridge or pedestrian crossing be built along Uhuru Highway (Kamencu 2013, 20–21) and in November 1971 and July 1972 there were further demonstrations centred on demands for an underpass across State House Road. Indeed, in 1972 the students explicitly protested against what they saw as motorists' indifference to the existing pedestrian crossing used by students on the road (37–38). Shortly afterwards, an underpass was built along Uhuru Highway. Its speedy construction in six months (Amutabi 2002) attests to the power of the students' protests.4
At a lecture I delivered at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Nairobi in 2012, at the height of the road building in the vicinity of the campus, I discussed the right to the city and infrastructure development in contemporary Nairobi. In the lively discussions that followed, students expressed their ambivalence about the construction projects, acknowledging the new risks and disruption they entailed but arguing that they were necessary in the interests of development, confirming Lamont's (2013, 376) observation of the ‘secular sacrifice’ that attaches to roads. For Lamont, road accidents (or ‘carnage’ to use his term) are ‘perceived as a blood price for the cost of the nation's development’ (376; see Klaeger 2013, 361). Similarly, according to Melly (2013, 385), for the residents of Dakar, the ‘present inconveniences and disruptions are simply the (often unjust) price that needs to be paid for the nation's alluring future’ (see Klaeger 2013, 361).
In the growing scholarship on roads in Africa, there is a recognition of the injustices attaching to automobility. Focusing on the victims of road traffic accidents, for example, scholars have investigated the actuarial injustices that result from failures to pay compensation to bereaved families and from unmet insurance claims. Lamont (2013) notes that even as governments encourage ‘the rapid growth of automotive capitalism’ (375), little ‘actuarial or judicial justice’ is available to those who suffer the social and economic impact of road accidents. Taking this observation further, and focusing not just on automobility but on road construction itself, it is also important to recognise that the benefits (‘value’) of road building do not accrue equally. The boom in property prices along the Thika Superhighway has benefited only a minority even as it is presented as critical to Kenya's regional and global status. Indeed, as prices have risen, those renting accommodation along the route, such as students at Kenyatta University, find themselves priced out of the rental sector close to campus. It is in this context that any ‘right to Nairobi’ must be developed. An analysis which focuses on the production of value, going beyond ideas of actuarial justice, allows us to see the material gains and losses resulting from infrastructural projects. According to Harvey (2011), it is critical to ‘develop alternative ways of thinking about both urban transformation and the production of value, and express those critiques to a broader public that has previously been sympathetic to such projects, even as they have shared unequally in the results’ (137).
As the student struggles for road safety in the 1960s and 1970s suggest, a right to the city must be formulated through what Chatterjee (2011, 15) has called ‘the struggles of political society’. Closely tied with oppositional politics (Amutabi 2002), the student protests of the immediate post-independence period can be read as an early assertion of a right to the city. Although it was not explicitly articulated in this language, students were framing a claim to the use-value of the city, and harnessing their demands for recognition as pedestrians and users of the road and the city to wider claims for political representation and voice. In the present day, in contrast, such improvements as have been made in the design of the Thika Superhighway have come about only through last-minute concessions. The Kenya Alliance of Resident Associations, for example, has actively sought to promote consultations with ‘stakeholders’ (KARA 2012). At one such meeting it was noted that footbridges across the 10-lane highway were built at intervals of 4 kilometres or 5 kilometres, forcing pedestrians needing to traverse the highway between these footbridges to attempt to run across the road itself, and resulting in fatalities (Ibid.). Extra footbridges were commissioned to be built in response. Far from asserting a radical claim to the city, students and other pedestrians have received improvements to Thika Superhighway as a bureaucratic concession, as what Chatterjee terms ‘the bestowals of civil society’ (Chatterjee 2011 cited in Amin 2012, 492). Returning to Harvey's (2011) question of who gives the right to the city meaning, the building of the Thika Superhighway shows that a bureaucratic right to the city will ‘almost always … arise as an exception, a consequence of being recognised as needy … rather than as rights-bearing citizens’ (Amin 2012, 492).
Conclusion: seeing spatial injustice
The name ‘Westgate’ has since 21 September 2013 come to stand not just for a place for wealthy consumers to visit in an African city that now regularly features in global rankings of expensive cities (Business Daily 2012; Economic Intelligence Unit 2013), but for a shocking attack on Saturday-morning shoppers in a Nairobi mall. The mall stands less than a mile from the Deep Sea settlement threatened with demolition to make way for a new road. At the centre of the Westgate story stands what Klopp (2008, 297) has called ‘the politics of mal-distribution of land’. Built on land irregularly allocated on the catchment of Nairobi River, it was identified for demolition together with surrounding buildings in the wake of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into on Illegal/Irregular Land Allocation of Public Land in Kenya (2009) (widely known as the ‘Ndung'u report’ after its chairperson) when the Minister of Lands of the time, James Orengo, stated that any titles found to have been irregularly allocated (including, he admitted, by his own officials) would be revoked (see Manji 2012). Neither the revocation of titles nor the demolition took place. Instead, after the attack the government promised to assist in restoring the mall, stating that ‘the government of Kenya is sincerely committed to ensuring that Westgate mall operations do resume within the shortest time possible through a public–private partnership model’ (The Star, October 10, 2013).
The story of Westgate Mall and the story of Deep Sea are intricately connected though rarely told together, for, as Amin (2012) has argued,
the city in a global age only exists as a collection of settlements with varied geographies of affiliation rather than as the sum of its parts, only particular parts of the city are projected as spaces of potentiality or attention for such a future, eschewing any obligation to think the city a field of shared life and common rights. The city is grasped as a space of disjunctive juxtapositions and autonomous communities, of selective provision from and access to a divided commons. (Amin 2012, 492)
Westgate Mall will be reconstructed using government funds as a symbol of the resilience of Kenya's capitalist path. Deep Sea will be torn down to make way for a continuation of a major road-building project behind which the government and international funders have thrown their weight. In the former, the middle class resumes its ‘pacification by cappuccino’ (Zukin 1995, 31) whilst in the latter, residents struggle against arbitrary state power and try to organise at the grassroots to resist eviction. With help from non-governmental organisations, they attempt to assert the rights to adequate housing and reasonable sanitation enshrined in Article 43 of Kenya's 2010 Constitution (Government of Kenya 2010). The rebuilding of Westgate reminds us that ‘the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels 1848, 36). The impulse of the Kenyan government to give backing to the mall redevelopment in spite of its location on irregularly held land is in keeping with the hyper-capitalist manifesto scripted in Kenya's Vision 2030, in what Smith (2013) describes as ‘a technologically futuristic image of Nairobi as a model “global city”’ (2, see also Sassen 1991). This paper has suggested that asserting a right to the city might begin to enable the spatial justice (Harvey 1973; Lefebvre 1968; Soja 2010) that contemporary Nairobi demands. Without an adequate conceptualisation of a right to the city, Nairobi's very many spatial injustices will go unnoticed and its speculative growth, urban destruction, environmental degradation and unhindered development of ‘exclusionary commons’ (Harvey 2012, 73) such as malls and gated communities will remain unchallenged.