Sights and sounds of the living city

SCHOOL: ARCHITECTURE AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT

DEPARTMENT: URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING

UNIT NAME: PARTICIPATORY PLANNING

UNIT CODE: BSP 204

CAT 1: URBAN PLANNING ISSUE IN KENYA

TOPIC; SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE CITY LIVING

NAME: DUNCAN IAN

ADMISSION NO: B15/4854/2018

INSTRUCTOR: DR WANGUI KIMARI

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INTRODUCTION
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE CITY LIVING; FROM ENKARE NYROBI TO NAIROBI

 How has exclusion in planning caused lack of quality living in Nairobi?

 In this paper it is my argument that exclusion in planning in Nairobi has caused what I
would figuratively call the 5As not to be achieved in Nairobi; Accessibility, Availability,
Affordability, Appropriateness, Accountability.

Enkare nyrobi once a marshy area where the native Maasai use to graze their animals and enjoy a
cool breeze with cold clear water of the river Nairobi little did they know that far down south in
Mombasa a metal road was being constructed and would pass by their land and the nature of life
here would be not be the same forever.1890 was the year when the railway appeared in Nairobi
and a dusty railway depot was to be constructed a hub that would connect Mombasa in the east
and the rubber tappers of Kampala.

The city grew with its famed safaris but behind the scenes of all the splendor all was not well,
black locals were struggling with the taxes, land ownership restrictions, exclusion and the more
racial and social class segregation dominated the shaping of the city.

Post 1963 the rapid population growth meant that traditional planning strategies could not
supply adequate services, leading to the proliferation of informality as a result it began to suffer a
spate of thefts and muggings hence the nickname,” Nairobbery” (WorldTravel guide) and this
stereotype still holds true to date. Plans, programs, strategies and decisions taken from the
perspective of planning, have historically been tools to reinforce the process of political and
social exclusion. Globalization has also acerbated the exclusionary tendencies of many
developmental programs.

The colonial plans were designed to contain settlement rather than allow for growth and change,
created the conditions for informal urban processes to proliferate in order to fill the void left by
them. The failures in Nairobi has affected the urban fabric of Nairobi leading to unachievable
states of the 5As; Accessibility, Availability, Affordability, Appropriateness, Accountability. The
failures are to be blamed on the political system in Kenya and lack of inclusion of the people in
planning. If urban residents are to become independent of political manipulations, and thereby
freeing themselves from the “Big Man” patronage system, the politicians will lose their control.
In order to maintain their control, it is therefore necessary for the ruling class to maintain the
status quo (Chabal, P. and Daloz, J-P. 1999).

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As such is the nature of Nairobi a tug of war between ruling classes and the so called “husters”
leaving within the city under the sun.

MAIN BODY

In the post-independence era a new discourse of inclusion and exclusion emerged. Urban areas
were constructed as economic centers, purposefully undermining the notion that they could be
places of native habitat or origin.

This discourse was used to justify successive periods of large-scale evictions of people who
resided on urban land without secure tenure and such is the nature of imperial reinstation and
(W. kimari. 2019) puts it that it is from such events, that the manifestation of a colonial
governance of space occur not only through a violent protection and segregation of those
wealthy and governable from those poor seen as ungovernable, but also by investing in a
militarization of select urban geographers, often with tragic consequences and raises the
question how appropriate is this practice ?  forced eviction and demolition of the homes of
thousands of families from an informal settlement in inappropriate form of the so called “urban
development” has been done illegally as the courts clearly stipulates that without following the
proper legal procedures, adequate consultation and providing alternative housing or
compensation, forced evictions are illegal and violates the constitutional rights of the dwellers,
the grossly inequitable land ownership structure which makes it difficult for the poor to access
land and decent shelter. Evictions cause significant socioeconomic hardship to individuals of the
slum dwellers which are “neglected parts of cities where housing and living conditions are
appallingly poor ranging from high density, squalid central city tenements to spontaneous
squatter settlements without legal recognition or rights, sprawling at the edge of cities”

. the people who have been living in the so-called informal areas from the past have neither been
asked on this issue nor have any efforts been made to relocate them once they are being evicted
and the causes are 3 : (1)conflicts over land rights – by far the most important cause of
evictions; (2) non-payment of excessive land and house rents; and (3)urban development or
redevelopment.

Multiplying individual and social impoverishment, including homeless-ness and the growth
of new slums, physical, psychological and emotional trauma; insecurity for the future;
medical hardship and the onset of disease; substantially higher trans-potation costs; loss of
livelihood and traditional lands; worsened housing conditions; physical injury or death
resulting from arbitrary violence; the removal of children from school; arrestor imprisonment of
those opposing an eviction; loss of faith by victims in the legal and political system; reduction of
low-income housing stock; racial segregation; loss of culturally signify-cant sites; the
confiscation of personal goods and property; substantially higher housing costs; absence of

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choice of alternative accommodation;criminalising self-help housing options; increased social

isolation; and tension with dwellers already at resettlement sites (UNHCHR, 1993:np) and this
is the story of the slum dweller in the once place of cool waters to the new city. As in other parts
of the world, evictions in Kenya have tremendous social, political and economic consequences,
including loss of lives, livelihoods, property, social networks, housing and political stability.
Unfortunately, eviction is an ineffective and failed strategy against the proliferation of slums
because it does not address the underlying causes of these settlements, namely, skewed land
distribution, poverty, excessive urbanisation,rapid population growth, limited access to urban
land, especially among the poor, and a shortage of low-income housing. As a result, most slums
reappear as soon as they are demolished.

” The bulldozers came just after midnight and the police and city council askaris [security
personnel] ordered us to vacate the houses and take our children with us out of the houses... We
inquired from the police and the security personnel as to why they wanted to demolish the
houses. They continually told us, ‘We are on duty’… After some minutes they fired teargas in the
whole area. People were scrambling to get all they could from their houses… The bulldozer
started flattening our houses with all the belongings inside...” remarks a victim, Jane Oyaro [2005]
deep sea settlement.

Accessibility of infrastructure and services and facilities is crucial in harnessing the potential of
urbanization in a city and Nairobi has been failing in actualizing this over the course of the years,
when urban spaces are accessible at the outset, new developments in city infrastructure are more
sustainable and less likely to require costly renovations or supplementary facilities or services in
the future to cater to excluded demographics, it simply means removing barriers to services but
has that been the case in Nairobi ?certainly not. Enkare nyrobi used to be accessible from all
corners and its services which was a rangeland for livestock and also the commodity water was
accessible to all whether man or animal who needed it. The city now is a congested city losing
more than 50 million a day as a result of congestion [2014]. poor transport system and disjointed
urban development in Nairobi are limiting its ability to serve global markets and create
employment. land use plans which enhance integration as opposed to segregation of land uses to
minimize car use as well as enhance connectivity is not the case in our city Although roads may
have been built in different times or periods of history, some of different types, classes or
conditions, there has been a great concern of their interconnection which leaves out other
sections of the city. For example, slum dwellers who actually consist of more than 40 percent of
the dwellers are not served by the major city arterials which run outside their settling areas e.g.,
mathare Kibera and mukuru kwa Jenga.

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“The police are usually resistant to come here because they say there are no roads…” A
resident of Kibera Laini Saba village[amnesty international publication: AFR 32/005/2009].

Exclusion of the people served by Thika road is also an issue since most of the overhead
footbridges have been placed where people didn’t initially used to cross from the footbridges end
up being in effective since it doesn’t serve their purpose efficiently. The city was planned to be
mostly a motorized environment leaving out the 70 percent of the walking and cycling majority
with the question of where are our walkways and cycling tracks ?

Accessibility to and availability of services in Nairobi is one of if not the biggest challenges
facing the over 3 million unplanned for parts of the city who are crammed into less than 10
percent of the land in Nairobi The experience of slum-dwellers starkly illustrates that people
living in poverty not only face deprivation but are also trapped in that poverty because they are
excluded from the rest of society and denied a say in the city. Slums/settlements lack adequate
physical infrastructure such as accessibility (roads and footpaths), sewer systems, drainage, water
and sanitation facilities, electricity and street lighting. Where such facilities exist, they are in a
bad state or are results of illegal connections as with the case in Mathare. Most residents of
Nairobi’s settlements do not have access to public water supplies, due to the longstanding view
that informal settlements were illegal thus local authorities were not held responsible for
providing access to water and other essential services. Neither the 1988 Nairobi City
Commission Development Plan nor the strategies that came out of the “Nairobi We Want” forum
of 1993, a convention that assembled “stakeholders, professionals and ordinary citizens,”
brought about any substantive changes for the ruins of the city (Owuor & Mbatia, 2008, p. 4)
Most people buy water from private water vendors although water supply is very intermittent for
their domestic use but the cost of buying water is high hence people lack this basic commodity of
life. UNDP noted in 2005 that in the informal settlements,

“the average price is some seven times higher than that paid by people in high-income
settlements served by the Nairobi Water and Sewage Company.”

Beyond simply capturing notions of nature as such, ecology(ies) of exclusion attends to how the
multiple marginalization’s and violence’s that condense in spaces like Mathare become part of
the morphology of this terrain, over time enabling and reinforcing phenomena as diverse as a
lack of water to extrajudicial killings. [W.KIMARI,2019]This settlements despite their existence
some spanning more than 100 years lack of basic services is the norm in their lives caused by

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Ecology of exclusion leading to spatial neglect. The story of a pump by W. kimari 2019, is a story
that
bring out to light the ecologies of exclusion by use of water accessibility in mathare and it speaks
volumes of the lager water problems in the city.

Nairobi’s sewerage system is generally poor, and the waste and disposal system dysfunctional
and unavailable to residents of settlements as they have limited or no access to the public sewer
lines and waste disposal systems bring out an issue of lack of integration of some areas into the
city plans some primitive channels playing the role of open sewer crisscross settlements
contaminating domestic water. Properties are built without proper sewerage disposal in town.

” We feel nobody cares about our situation and the dangers that come with the actions such as
that of this individual who does not care about our situation… He is powerful, that is all that
matters… Do you think government officials who come here don’t know that what this owner [of
houses) is doing is wrong?” asks a sound of a dweller.

Also the dwellers are faced with the challenge of unavailable services such as health and schools
which are now mainly privatized while the local mwananchi cannot afford this raising the case of
affordability of this services which are a right as per the constitution. Most children living in the
settlements therefore do not have access to the government’s free primary education programme
and children have to travel long distances to attend school and also get medical health care.

It's not easy to get one’s children to school. You have to sacrifice things for some time. Perhaps
what you get per day is too little. So you have to go without food, without basics. Sometimes you
overlap breakfast and lunch, to get them to school” is David’s sounds, a korogocho dweller
[Amnesty International].

There are great disparities in health care between informal settlements and the middle- and high-
income areas, and the health problems are also different. Middle- and high-income groups access
healthcare through private clinics or government hospitals whereas informal settlements are
largely left out. Privatization and cost-sharing make healthcare costs unaffordable to the poor
hence even though mama mboga in the slums lack affordable healthcare to cure her TB which
she got from the construction of a road besides her kiosk she cant access it from their own
residential area.

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The Nairobi county government has been notorious on its accountability capabilities .it has no
system enabling measurement of performance against the standard to check its effectiveneness
and performance. Before 2004 the city budgets were never published raising some questions too
also the communities are neither coordinated nor sufficiently empowered to make effective
demands on city machinery there is simply no communication channels between the population
and governing authorities. Local authority autonomy vis-à-vis central government is inadequate
regarding revenue generation and spending. The budgets do not pass effective the mark of
sufficient public participation since its mainly made behind closed doors in the city hall premises
and the output is enforced to the city dwellers.

Swyngedouw (1996, p. 67) says that we can narrate:

many interrelated tales of the city: the story of its people and the powerful socio-ecological
processes that produce the urban and its spaces of privilege and exclusion; of participation and
marginality; of rats and bankers; of water-borne diseases and speculation in water industry
related futures and options; of chemical, physical and biological reactions and transformations;
of the global hydrological cycle and global warming; of the capital, machinations and strategies
of dam builders; of urban land developers; of the knowledges of the engineers; of the passage
from river to urban reservoir is the conditions of our city under the sun.

REFLECTIONS

In the case of evictions, it should be noted that human compassion must soften the rough edges
of justice in all situations. The eviction of squatters not only means their removal from their
houses but the destruction of the houses themselves. The humbler the dwelling, the greater the
suffering and more intense the sense of loss. It is the dialogue with the person likely to be
affected by the proposed action which meets the requirement that justice must also be seen to be
done.

Building of trust is sometimes regarded as the genuine benefit of participatory processes because
of its presumed positive influence on social relations, systems, and psychological functioning,
that goes even beyond the planning process. participation as a process of social interaction
involves different actors, trust represents a crucial aspect in structuring mutual relationships. As
such, trust may facilitate an open dialog and productive cooperation among different actors as
well as influence public support for decisions and project

The government has failed to undertake genuine consultations with the residents, failed to take
steps required to uphold the rights of the citizens and also has failed to provide legal security of
tenure for the dwellers all because government has failed to recognize the growth and
proliferation of informal settlement and include them in city plans . In relation to planned mass
evictions, the government should ensure genuine consultation with the affected communities to

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identify all feasible alternatives to evictions, put in place appropriate procedural and legal
safeguards, and develop a comprehensive relocation and compensation plan. The slum clearance
policy did not halt the proliferation of informal settlements. Instead, displaced residents moved
to other areas in and around the city, creating new informal settlements and slums and numbers
growing from some 100,000 to over 2 million people so displacement is not the solution but
following participatory measure could ensure a practical solution is found. Governments must
also ensure that no one is rendered homeless or vulnerable to the violation of other human rights
as a consequence of eviction. Adequate alternative housing and compensation for all losses must
be made available to those affected prior to eviction, regardless of whether they rent, own,
occupy or lease the
land or housing in question (General Comment No.7, paragraph 16).

There is no proper service delivery assessment, although a telephone complaints service are
available but highly ineffective and the city county should implement an effective
communication system between the citizens and all stakeholders and should also launch a citizen
awareness policy.

For Services such as health the county can explore ways of partnering with microfinance
institutions to create mechanisms through which members of these institutions, particularly the
poor and those in the informal sector can participate in insurance programs such as NHIF or a
local insurance mechanism.

Initiation of Water Action Groups in the local community based organizations made up of
citizens, who have volunteered to address issues which affect consumers of water services within
their areas .Series of workshops, interviews and questionnaires are closely linked to
identification of city (strength, weakness, opportunity and threat).inclusion of the public mainly
the common mwananchi who walks 90 percent of his day time in the making of the
transportation plans such as the JKIA-Wetlands highway and also the major urban arterials we
should have a reorientations from cars to people also in the tertiary linkages in the slum
settlements and the best way to do this is having public consultations with the locals concerning
this issue. Congestion also can be solved by issue of having an exclusory of the matatu and bus
owners in the setup of the bus rapid transport system, the bus rapid transit system is a practical and
relatively inexpensive planning and engineering compromise. It is
able to move many more people than private automobiles and regular buses in less
time and with much lower energy and environmental costs, even if it cannot quite
achieve the capacities of full-fledged urban rail and subway systems (Blanco and
Kobayashi, 2009; Davila, 2013; Mejía et al., 2013).

Community based organization can also follow an example of Mexico based form
as which has the well outlined processes of creating, the energy of the movement is

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channeled into organizational concerns, not just “mobilizing” but also structuring.
These local movements have their origins in small and diverse groups with
different socio-cultural, ethnic, class, age and gender roles; they also have different
levels of formal and informal education and of involvement with external
collaborators. Such groups “fuse” in a convergence of wills, forming an embryonic
nucleus searching for a vision that inspires and sets an example. This nucleus only
develops into an organization if it can convoke all the people involved in the
problems to join in an inclusive dynamic. The birth of the organization allows the
community-based organization members to enter into a permanent struggle to
undertake “decision-making” in a democratic way. This requires them to overcome
conventional, pyramidal organizational schemes, to search for alternative
information and to develop the ability to communicate regular and systematic
information to the general public as a first step towards establishing democratic
decision-making processes. [Moctezuma 2001 pg,8 2001]

Put participatory planning into practice with a vision that goes beyond immediate issues, framing
them in the context of broader themes such as community development, livelihood opportunities
and ecological concerns.

They should Use their own forces and resources, while demanding publicly supported projects
related to water supply, health, education, infrastructure, housing and environmental issues.
Building practices that allow for open access to information, and develop democratic decision-
making processes, changing the dominant (vertical and non-participatory) organizational
patterns. Ensure accountability, not only in decision-making but also in the implementation of
plans, the use of resources and the handling of power relationships among members. Promotion
of productive, cultural and ecological innovations that allow the process to fight multiple
obstacles and create consistent and permanent alternatives that are viable is the way to go for the
Nairobi people.

Opportunities for genuine consultations with those affected should be addressed in finding
mechanisms to achieve appropriate means in doing processes,

Based on the principles of participation the government and communities can engage in making
of rules and boundaries regarding issues on exclusion to find clear solutions to the problems.
People should be allowed to work in groups and scales which they are comfortable in and also to
support each other and such can be in the provision of local services and this would also make
them more flexible and adaptive in the ever changing socio-political aspects of Nairobi.

CONCLUSIONS

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Life is precarious for the approximately 2 million people who live in Nairobi’s informal
settlements and slums, People have lived in slums in and around Nairobi since the city’s
formation at the turn of the 20th century.3 Over the years, government responses have failed to
ensure the state’s obligation to realize the human right to adequate housing. Recent government
papers and policies have recognized the existence and continued growth of slums and informal
settlements in Kenya, but not enough has been done to rectify decades of failure by the state to
develop comprehensive and coherent policies to address lack of security of tenure and access to
essential services in these settlements. Respect for human rights demands inclusion, demands
that everyone gets a say, demands that those in power protect people from threats to their
security.  the community-based participatory can be applied in conducting major slum
developments.

Regarding the major developments and policy regarding the informal settlements it has always
been a policy making in the top-bottom order but for maximum efficiency and achievement of
goals it should be re oriented to a more bottom-up making policy making process.

A participatory process
must be conceived at the community level to secure that the
primary commitment of the process is to the community and
to protect the autonomy of the community’s participation. In
other words, a participatory process should emerge as a result
of the community’s definition of its overall objectives and their
expectation of the private and the public sectors’ contributions to the process.

Nairobi was established more than 100 years ago as a transit point for the Uganda Railway, built
by the British colonial power, in order to link Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast with Lake
Victoria in the interior of East Africa, for purposes of extracting natural resources this later
turned around into a place for social economic and political inclusion but participation of the
locals could be a remedy to this.

The urban poor in Nairobi will continue to be marginalized and excluded from urban processes,
unless the city council makes an integrated approach to urban development. The collective
consumption goods of; roads, sewage, water and power supply can only be effectively installed
through state/municipal initiatives (Castells, M. 1983). Exclusionary forces at work at macro
levels, makes it imperative that, policies for urban inclusion be thoroughly articulated at the
micro levels by the local authority for the common mwananchi.

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REFERENCES
Amnesty International. (2009). Kenya: The Unseen Majority: Nairobi’s Two Million Slum-Dwellers.

Roy, D., Lees, M. H., Palavalli, B., Pfeffer, K., & Sloot, M. P. (2014). The emergence of slums: A contemporary
view on simulation models. Environmental modelling & software, 59, 76-90.

PROFILE, U. S. (2006). NAIROBI URBAN SECTOR PROFILE.

Sheikh, K., & Rao, S. (2007). Participatory city planning in Chhattisgarh: a civil society initiative. Environment and
Urbanization, 19(2),

Hassan, G. F., El Hefnawi, A., & El Refaie, M. (2011). Efficiency of participation in planning. Alexandria
Engineering Journal, 50(2), 203-212.

Angotti, T., & Irazábal, C. (2017). Planning latin American cities: dependencies and “Best Practices”.

Anyamba, T. J. C. (2005). Nairobi’s Informal Modernism. 

Moctezuma, P. (2001). Community-based organization and participatory planning in south-east Mexico

City. Environment and Urbanization, 13(2), 117-133.Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway.563-581

Kimari, W. (2019). The story of a pump: life, death and afterlives within an urban planning of “divide and rule” in
Nairobi, Kenya. Urban Geography, 1-20..

Anderson, Ben, & McFarlane, Colin. (2011). Assemblage and geography. Area, 43(2), 124–127

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