Paper short abstract:

Urban growth concentrates financial flows. The paper analyses economic rationales, creation of value and land ownership uses of less studied city builders: businessmen, civil servants, households, land companies who invest in land and anticipate the city to come in the periphery of Nairobi in Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

In Kenya, forty to sixty kilometres from the capital city Nairobi, beacons, fences, barbed wire, walls, tree alignments, thorn bushes shape the landscape. These boundary markers reveal the dynamics of land acquisition and subdivision into small plots in rural districts. Cultivated or natural land are used for property development, individual construction, and, most importantly, land hoarding and speculation. Urban studies and most approaches to measure the world’s urbanisation take little account of these still uninhabited bare land where money flows. They focus on already built-up areas and certain groups of investors: real estate companies, state actors, investors mobilising large amounts of money, and acquiring large areas of land etc. They take less account of ordinary actors of land transactions and city-making: businessmen, civil servants, households, small land purchase companies who invest their money and anticipate the city to come. This paper will examine the creation of value and land ownership uses - to save money, to fend off commercial activities, to build housing, to access credit, to resell to urbanites etc. Urban growth concentrates financial flows from a diversity of actors inducing speculation and land pressure. This paper is based on an ethnographic survey since 2019 anchored in these territories in Kenya. We have followed more than fifty buyers and sellers to understand their logics of investment, speculation and accumulation around land value. A photographic apparatus was also set up to narrate these circuits of money and to shed light on these upcoming cities.