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Paper short abstract

This paper considers the fragile grounds of Nairobi’s built environment in light of concerns about precarious buildings, untrustworthy surfaces and popular suspicions of power. It traces how urban underneaths shape above ground modes of knowing, inducing anxieties about the seen and the unseen.

Paper long abstract

This paper considers the fragile grounds of Nairobi’s built environment in light of concerns about precarious buildings, untrustworthy surfaces and popular suspicions of power. Taking Nairobi’s high-rise construction boom and a recent spate of collapsed buildings as its starting point, it examines how longstanding ideas about the hidden and duplicitous workings of politics do not operate in a realm distinct from the material world, but are rooted in its very substance: the materials from which the city is made generate public critique and action.

Drawing on Latour’s (2020) notion of the ‘critical zone’, and his invitation to think across ‘the thin skin of the living earth’, I trace how urban undergrounds are deeply imbricated in above ground modes of knowing. High-rise construction is premised on the extraction of ground to pour foundations, as well as on vast mobilisations of sand, stone, rubble and other materials necessary to building.

Usually, such manipulations of ground remain out of sight to urban residents, but when buildings collapse these underneaths are rendered suddenly visible. Poor quality construction is exposed, along with developers’ prioritisation of profit over safety, prompting public debates about ‘fake’ buildings, corruption and immoral economies. I examine how Nairobi’s frail buildings induce anxieties about the seen and the unseen, and suspicions that the surface promises of the high-rise city conceal a much murkier underneath.