Nairobi came into existence as a railway depot at the end of the nineteenth century, when the construction of the Uganda Railway connecting Mombasa with the interior parts of present-day Uganda reached the area around what would later be called the Nairobi River (Ogot and Ogot 2020). The new railway depot attracted labourers, traders, and sex workers from different ethnic backgrounds who were united by the feeling that migrating to Nairobi would allow them to make money to pay the taxes demanded by the colonial government, support their rural kin, and progress with personal goals (White 1990). So-called ‘African villages’ soon cropped up in the surroundings of the railway headquarters, the government buildings, and the Indian Bazaar, perpetuating the city’s emerging racial divide. Many of the houses in these villages were built by private investors who rented out small rooms to mostly male migrants who were not allowed to roam freely in the city and were legally obliged to return home to their wives and families once their contracts had expired (Anderson 2000). While Nairobi has been racially divided since its inception, ‘the colony as a whole [became] segregated by gender’ (Spronk 2012: 50) as men migrated to Nairobi and left their wives in the rural villages. The labour migration of men thereby also played a significant role in fostering the narrative of the male breadwinner.
To control the African population, the colonial government demolished the ‘African villages’ in the name of hygiene, sanitation, and health standards (Simpson 1915). In the 1920s, it founded Pumwani as the first officially sanctioned settlement for Africans (Ese and Ese 2020: chapter 3). There, black Kenyans could rent plots for an annual fee and build their own houses. Entrepreneurial Kenyans with enough capital seized this opportunity and began to rent out rooms to migrant workers. In the following decades, the ‘site and service concept’ of Pumwani, which provided rooms for migrants who were not allowed to become permanent residents of the city, gave way to the idea of municipal housing. This shift in the colonial housing policy tried to account for the fact that Nairobi had become home to a significant number of African men, women, and families (Huchzermeyer 2011: 127).
The ‘Nairobi Master Plan for a Colonial Capital’ (White et al. 1948) outlined the principles of this new municipal housing strategy. Its authors believed that changing Nairobi’s housing conditions could transform the ‘African’ into ‘a tinged copy of the urban Englishman’ (Slaughter 2004: 39). The spatial rearrangement that the master plan had in mind was based on the ‘neighbourhood unit’. These units were conceptualized as ‘small enough to facilitate acquaintance’ but ‘large enough to provide a full range of local social, recreational and educational facilities’ (White et al. 1948: 46). The spatial arrangement of the units would allow inhabitants to reach their work places quickly, and each unit was supposed to include all amenities necessary for a healthy and good life, such as hospitals, schools, churches, open-air spaces, and community centres.
Despite these rather progressive intentions, the plan had little impact on the lives of most Nairobians. The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by an increasing demand for housing that could no longer be satisfied by the emerging municipal housing estates organized according to the principle of the ‘neighbourhood unit’. The master plan’s projection of around 270,000 inhabitants by 1975 (White et al. 1948: 42) was reached as early as 1960. As a result, rather than living in municipal housing estates such as Makadara or Jericho, most Nairobians lived in sprawling informal settlements. Instead of expanding according to a clear concept, the city developed in an ‘ad hoc manner’ (Huchzermeyer 2011: 163), aggravating the problematic housing situation and leading to overcrowding, high rents, crime, and illegal subletting, issues that continued to trouble the housing situation of Nairobi well after Kenya became independent in 1963.
While fears of racial mixture, crime, a chaotic transport sector, and problematic hygienic conditions were the leading drivers of colonial government interventions, the widening potential to siphon off national and international funds became one of the main objectives during Daniel arap Moi’s presidency (1978–2002). The structural adjustment reforms imposed on Kenya in the 1980s and 1990s gave politicians and bureaucrats further justification to neglect the housing sector and turn a blind eye to land-grabbing and the illegal construction of houses. It was against the background of the government’s unwillingness and inability to develop a feasible housing strategy that high-rise tenement estates started to emerge in the late 1980s and, increasingly, have taken over Nairobi’s urban landscape since 2000. By demolishing informal settlements like Kware, the Kenyan government handed over urban space to the speculative interests of Nairobians with the political connections and financial means to invest capital in the housing sector. Whilst the academic and political world discussed the improvement of informal settlements under the banner of ‘slum upgrading’ (Huchzermeyer 2008), a form of urban ‘incrementalism’ from above emerged (Silver 2014). Wealthy and well-connected Nairobians successively purchased or grabbed every available piece of land to construct one identical-looking high-rise block after the other, setting off the spectacular transformation of Nairobi’s housing sector that a friend of mine once succinctly described by saying that ‘when money speaks, even stones listen’.