Bulldozers, homes and highways: Nairobi and the right to the city

Abstract

In Kenya road building, widely viewed as an ‘unqualified human good’, is closely linked to an ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. In this paper the author argues that road building 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. In light of massive infrastructural transformations, the author develops a conceptualisation of the right to the city: what is needed is a radical understanding of the city and its potentialities that wrests control of the idea away from a bureaucratic vision, and imbues it instead with collective meaning.