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The History and Infrastructure of an Aspirational Estate
You don’t need to break down a Riemann Hypothesis to know where newbies in the city will head to, especially when they are looking for jobs.
Journalist Irvin Jalango (2016) about Pipeline
In November 2018, when I went to Pipeline for the first time, Samuel picked me up from my hotel in Nairobi’s central business district (CBD). When we got off at one of Pipeline’s matatu (Kiswahili, ‘bus used for public transport’) ranks after being stuck in Nairobi’s notorious traffic for over an hour, I found myself jumping over foul-smelling sewers and crossing railway tracks on and around which people sold, among other things, clothes, shoes, fruits, chapos (Kiswahili, chapati, ‘fried flatbread’), vegetables, kitchen utensils, mturaa (Sheng, ‘Nairobi sausage’, minced meat sausages with spices), gas cylinders, mattresses, traditional medicine, fried, fresh and dried fish, and githeri (Kiswahili, ‘boiled beans with maize’). Navigating this open-air market was an endless mass of people trying to make their way home. Boda-boda (Kiswahili, ‘moto-taxis’) and hooting lorries used any space available to move a few centimetres forward. I followed Samuel through a maze of small roads and high-rise buildings. Due to the estate’s density, we had to pass through the ground floors of some tenement blocks, making use of what were locally known as ‘bypasses’ connecting Pipeline’s main roads (see figure 3). I soon lost all sense of direction, partly because I was trying to avoid stepping into muddy areas filled with sewage and garbage but also because I was fascinated by what was happening around me. When we arrived at Samuel’s apartment, a mere ten minutes later, I confessed that I would never find my way back to the matatu rank. Samuel laughed and told me that if I lived in Pipeline, I would know my way around it in less than a week.
When I mentioned my plans to move to Pipeline, many of my Kenyan middle-class friends were shocked. Their reaction echoed the journalistic coverage of the estate. Alternatively called ‘disaster zone’ (Otieno 2017), ‘concrete tenement jungle’ (Mwau 2019), or the ‘laughing stock of Nairobi’ (Ambani 2021), journalists portrayed Pipeline as an urban failure. Media stories include a young child who came home to find her mother stabbed to death by her father, who then committed suicide (Njagi 2012, see also Muiruri 2021); tiny apartments being used as makeshift abortion clinics or overcrowded child day-care centres where toddlers spent their days like lab mice (Ambani 2021) without getting enough sunshine to prevent diseases such as rickets (Njanja 2020); and dead embryos placed in sewers by Pipeline’s sex workers who offer their services for less than 100 KSh (Wanzala 2018).
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Figure 3 One of Pipeline’s many bypasses connecting the estate’s main streets and ensuring that high-rise blocks can be constructed next to each other without wasting space. Photograph by the author, 18 August 2022.
Leaving aside this homogenous journalistic coverage imbued with middle-class anxieties about a place where ‘children of a lesser God’ (Ambani 2022) live, locally circulating rumours were equally imaginative. They ranged from accounts about kidnapping syndicates who sold children to rich and infertile businessmen, to gossip about a sinister group that abducted obese women and sold their flesh or made soup with their fat. Although understudied (exceptions include Huchzermeyer 2011, Maina and Mwau 2018, Mwau 2020, Ndegwa 2016, Obala 2011, Obala and Mattingly 2014, Ondieki 2016, Smith 2020, 2023), Pipeline and other high-rise tenement conglomerations in Nairobi were subject to excessive fantasies. Two key reasons for the extent to which high-rise settlements such as Pipeline triggered the imaginations of Nairobians were their distinctiveness and novelty. While this type of densely populated settlement is a common sight elsewhere in the world (see Jansen 2015, Mathews 2011, Schwenkel 2020), cities in sub-Saharan Africa tended to expand horizontally, not vertically, during the twentieth century, resulting in relatively low levels of population density.
Recent research (Agyemang et al. 2018, Gastrow 2020a, Goodman 2020, Smith and Woodcraft 2020), however, suggests that portrayals of African cities as mostly consisting of horizontally sprawling informal settlements are one-sided and risk constraining political initiatives to improve urban living conditions. In fact, the trend toward vertical housing in Nairobi has turned Marie Huchzermeyer’s prediction that verticalization would take over the housing sector in Kenya’s capital into reality (2011: chapter 9). During my fieldwork, tenement housing blocks were no longer the future of Nairobi but the everyday urban environment, especially for most migrants who had come to Kenya’s capital to carve out a better life for themselves and their rural families. Scholars and politicians who have ignored the verticalization of Nairobi’s housing sector should therefore better their understanding of how tenants live in dense and congested places like Pipeline sooner rather than later.
1 Focusing on the lives of migrant men in Pipeline complements the scholarly literature on Nairobi. In the last decades, urban geographers, anthropologists, and other social scientists have published works on diverse areas of Nairobi, for example, the city’s western, more affluent parts (Spronk 2012), informal settlements such as Kibera, Korogocho and Mathare (see, for instance, Guma 2020, Kimari 2017, Neumark 2017, Thieme 2013), as well as Eastleigh (Carrier 2016) and Kaloleni (Smith 2019), thereby allowing us to grasp Nairobi’s fragmented and multiple nature (see Charton-Bigot and Rodrigues-Torres 2010).The estate’s controversial image might also partly result from the politically, economically, and architecturally dubious ways in which it came into existence. In the wake of the 1980s structural adjustment reforms (Rono 2002), politicians tolerated, or even encouraged, the destruction of informal settlements in the name of ‘slum upgrading’ (Huchzermeyer 2008, see also De Feyter 2015), indicating that they had no proper plan for dealing with the country’s ongoing urbanization and growing need for housing. Scrupulous and wealthy private investors, however, quickly saw the lack of accommodation as a business opportunity and started, sometimes illegally and sometimes legally, to acquire land on which to construct high-rise blocks. As of the early 2000s, and relying upon what Constance Smith has called ‘a semi-licit assemblage of circumvented planning laws, pliable oversight, off-the-books negotiations’, and ‘opaque documentation’, these businessmen collaborated with ‘an opportunistic construction industry using poor-quality materials’ (Smith 2020: 15) to radically reshape Nairobi’s housing sector. How male migrants carved out their economic and social lives in the material and architectural results of this ‘gray development’ (ibid.) – endless rows of vertical housing blocks that are too quickly equated with total anonymity or even social anomie – is the key interest of this book.