Paper short abstract:

New master planning is reimagining Nairobi as a ‘world class’ city of the future. For public housing tenants, these glossy yet speculative visions have provoked anxiety. Residents are turning to the material histories of the estate as they negotiate the 'not-yet-ness' of the future.

Paper long abstract:

The Kenyan government's Vision 2030 initiative envisages the "transformation of Kenya into a middle income country by the year 2030", and the reinvention of Nairobi as a "world-class metropolis". Reproducing the familiar processual chronology of development planning, Vision 2030 is assumed as an endpoint, a destination, to which the inexorable march of progress will arrive in fifteen years time.

Yet these glossy visions of Nairobi as a global city often sit uncomfortably with the architectural legacies of Kenya's imperial past. For residents of the city's colonial-era public housing, this past is very much present: they continue to live in a material environment designed to contain colonial subjects. As the future regeneration of these estates looms ever larger, the pasts of these communities have come into sharp focus. Vision 2030 seems to have no place for these historic neighbourhoods, emphasizing instead the model of a networked, ahistorical, world city.

This paper focuses on Kaloleni, a housing estate built in the 1940s, as residents negotiate their lives in relation to ambiguous histories and uncertain futures. Whilst planning may tell itself its own story about progress and achievement, it may produce quite different temporal and material effects. City-level master planning has provoked ambivalent sentiments of anxiety, hope and speculation among residents, as well as a reengagement with the social and material histories of the estate. This paper explores the generative potential of these negotiations and disruptions, illuminating new ways of thinking about the past, and of negotiating the uncertainty of the future.