What many Nairobians call Pipeline is an area that covers two square kilometres and comprises two electoral wards within Embakasi South constituency: Pipeline and Kware (see map 3).
1 I use the term ‘Pipeline’ to refer to the agglomeration of high-rise tenement blocks in Kware and Pipeline ward. Whenever I use ‘Kware’, I refer to Kware ward. Where I need to emphasise that I am talking about Pipeline ward, I use ‘Pipeline ward’. Though divided by a street, these wards form a coherent complex of hundreds of high-rise blocks residents call ‘plots’.
2 The use of the term ‘plot’, which usually refers to a piece of land smaller than an acre (for instance, 50 x 100 feet), is revealing. As most high-rise buildings in Pipeline fully occupy the small piece of land that the owner bought, buildings had become synonymous with the pieces of land on which they were built. The estate is bounded by Outer Ring Road to the east and Airport North Road to the south. Pipeline merges into the informal settlement of Mukuru Kwa Njenga and the Imara Daima estate toward its west. Its northern border is marked by a large water-filled quarry that gave Kware its name. Mombasa and Jogoo Road connect the estate with Nairobi’s CBD, colloquially known as ‘town’. While an overcrowded passenger train transports people from the estate to the CBD in the early morning and back in the late afternoon (40 KSh), minibuses drive to town throughout the day (between 40 KSh and 100 KSh depending on the time of travel).
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Map 3 Pipeline. Map drawn by Robin von Gestern.
According to Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, Pipeline and Kware wards together had roughly 70,000 registered voters in 2022 (IEBC 2022). Considering that ‘a significant number of tenants are not registered as voters in the city’ (Maina and Mwau 2018: 221) and that Kenyans under the age of eighteen cannot register as voters, I initially estimated Pipeline’s population to be around 170,000. However, a survey of a two-hectare area around the plot I lived in revealed slightly over 3,000 housing units, 41 general shops, 31 beauty salons, fifteen liquor stores, nine butcheries, three private clinics, and a mere two private schools. As my interviews with inhabitants revealed an average of 3.5 household members, we can tentatively assume a population density of around 5,000 people per hectare. This suggests that Pipeline’s population could well be over 250,000, making it one of the most densely populated estates worldwide.
During my fieldwork, most of Pipeline’s inhabitants were migrants under 40 who were either unmarried, single parents, or part of a family with a few young children. While many of my interlocutors suggested that the majority of Pipeline’s inhabitants ethnically identified as Kamba, Pipeline was not segregated into areas exclusively or predominantly inhabited by people from the same ethnic group. I cannot rule out the possibility that some landlords preferred tenants of their ethnic background, but in the plots where I lived or spent most of my time the tenants hailed from all over Kenya. Many of my interlocutors from piny Luo (Dholuo, ‘Luo land’) preferred to mingle with other jo-Luo for cultural and linguistic reasons, and some barber shops, gyms, pool halls and bars attracted people from the same ethnic group (see Parkin 1978: 36–7). In the end, though, Pipeline’s promises of modernity and its proximity to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) and Nairobi’s industrial area made it an attractive estate for male migrants from all over Kenya who were looking for casual work or formal employment. While some migrants found work in factories, hotels, or restaurants, others tried their luck in the estate’s vibrant local economy or were engaged in Kenya’s emerging gig economy as Uber drivers (Iazzolino 2023) or students writing essays for US-American, Chinese or British students (Kingori 2021).
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Map 4 Nairobi’s east. Map drawn by Robin von Gestern.
Pipeline belongs to Nairobi’s economically and politically marginalized eastern part (see map 4). While almost all governmental, parastatal, and international organizations have their offices either in the CBD or in Nairobi’s lush and green western parts, most of the city’s manual workers and their families live in the cramped single rooms of high-rise tenements, or in the mabati (Kiswahili, ‘iron sheets’) shacks of informal settlements such as Mathare and Mukuru Kwa Njenga in Nairobi’s east. The inhabitants of eastern Nairobi, who include Uber drivers, industrial labourers, low-paid white-collar workers, housemaids, sex workers, and matatu conductors, keep the city running by maintaining the town’s water and electricity infrastructure, driving expats from appointment to appointment, or assuring that passengers and cargo leave the international airport on time. This bifurcation of Kenya’s capital into a rich western and a marginalized eastern part has its roots in colonial times, when the CBD and the western parts housed the colony’s white elite and black Kenyans occupied the city’s eastern fringes.
Nairobi’s east is also geologically marginalized due to the black cotton soil dominating its surface. In contrast to the red soil found in Nairobi’s west, black cotton soil is a highly compressible soil type found in the city’s low-lying areas. Due to its lesser ability to absorb water, unpaved roads in Pipeline become extremely muddy during the rainy season (see figure 4), and the construction of houses requires deep foundations. It is thus no mere coincidence that the colonial elite favoured Nairobi’s western areas. The inherent problems of black cotton soil led the urban planners who drafted the Nairobi Metropolitan Growth Strategy in 1973 (Nairobi Urban Study Group 1973: paragraph 60) to advise that the city should expand to the north-east, in the direction of Thika, and not to the east. Comparable to other parts of the 1973 master plan that emphasized the need to decentralize Nairobi and upgrade its transport infrastructure, this advice, which would have prevented Pipeline from becoming the ‘concrete tenement jungle’ (Mwau 2019) of today, was never taken seriously. History took a different path, but the authors of the 1973 strategy proved correct in their prediction that the Kenyan government would not be able to supply the amount of housing demanded by Nairobi’s steadily increasing population (Nairobi Urban Study Group 1973: paragraphs 29–30).