Wangui Kimari: Mo Faya – Socio-ecological survivals in Nairobi’s outlaw settlement

Critical Urbanism: Current Debates

Please register for the event/Zoom link by sending an email to maren.larsen@clutterunibas.ch.

The series Current Debates  exposes students to schools of thought and concrete interventions that redefine understandings of urban lifeworlds in the twenty-first century. The lecture series will explore the dynamics that shape cities and how cities in turn impact the course of locally situated and global phenomena. Guest lecturers hail from a range of disciplines and fields in the social sciences including urban and regional planning, geography, political theory, art and activism, and architectural research.

Contemporary urban planning practices in Nairobi are often framed as movements towards “world-class city” status localized within a situated “Africa rising” moment. Wangui Kimaris current project (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town) wants to move beyond the hegemony of these official narratives to think about Nairobi from its “outlaw” settlements. To do this it dwells in the social experiences of urban spatial management in Mathare, a poor ‘slum’ in the east of Nairobi, to draw attention to what she argues is the imperial assemblage that produces this city; one informed by political, ecological, social and economic ideas and practices that have their grounding in empire. In so doing, it connects themes often examined in silos – for example, slum fires, evictions, ‘illegal’ water tapping, cholera, extrajudicial killings, youth urban vernaculars, subject formation and floods – and draws attention to how an increasingly militarized urban planning contributes to what she terms ecologies of exclusion, allowing that the police become de facto urban planners and managers. Notwithstanding the historical neglect and force of urban governance in the poor space that she highlights, ultimately, she would like to make evident how those framed as the city’s outlaws engage with and emerge from the many violent articulations of an imperial urban planning through dynamic socio-ecological survivals. And from within these poor urban struggles, they are able to articulate more grounded narrations of the history and possible futures of Nairobi.

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