Negotiating the City: Builders, Planners, Dwellers and the Making of Nairobi

Paper Abstract: The rise of Chinese businesses in Nairobi since the early 2000s has transformed the ways in which the city is planned, built, and lived. This paper examines the impacts of China’s engagement in Kenya on city development, exploring which contested visions of the city may emerge. In Nairobi, China-built urban infrastructure not only divides the local urban middle class but also evidences conflicting interests among Chinese stakeholders. The paper further proposes that we venture beyond the level of the nation-state, and thus the domain of sovereign debt and government-to-government loans, when asking questions of citizenship, governance, and sovereignty. It proposes that the scale of the city ultimately offers new vistas to the powers at work to produce visions of the future, which are often different from those that urban dwellers imagine and aspire to.