By Constance Smith

Emergent Conversation 22

This essay is part of the series The Politics of Crisis, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 22

Photo by Constance Smith.

“This is a crisis,” Josephat exclaimed, gesturing to the concrete debris and mutilated steel that had once been a block of tenement housing. “This city—even you can’t know where you are living. Any time, it can just collapse. … And politicians they don’t care, they only think of their stomachs. Now where do we go? For us wananchi (ordinary citizens), Nairobi is a death trap” (Fieldnotes, March 2022).

Figure 1. Photo by James Muriuki.

Over the past two decades in Africanist research, there have been powerful scholarly appeals to move on from narratives about crisis, and to think things otherwise: to stop seeing African cities as sites of failure or dejection and to recognize instead their vitality, sociality, and spaces of possibility (Simone 2004; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008; Roitman 2017; Simone and Pieterse 2017). This literature has reframed the study of urban Africa, urging an approach that avoids binary prescriptions of success/failure, crisis/anti-crisis, and does justice to the ways that the seemingly broken, fragmentary, or derelict can also be sites of emergence from which alternative urban forms take shape. There is no doubt that these approaches have been influential and extremely generative for developing a more nuanced perspective on urban Africa. But what does it mean to critique notions of crisis whilst standing with a desperate man amid the rubble of a building collapse? What ethical imperatives are at play when we stop naming crisis and reframe it as contingency, provisionality or as part of the quotidian, ongoing everyday?

Figure 2. Photo by James Muriuki.

For the past few years, I have been engaged in research on high-rise housing disasters in Kenya (and in the UK), examining their interrelations with the materialities and politics of urban verticalization, real estate speculation, and material and economic extractivism. This project has taken me from quarries where building stone is extracted to Nairobi’s high-rise construction sites, from abandoned skyscraper projects to collapsed tenements, to some of the densest residential neighbourhoods in the world. [Fig 1; Fig 2] Through encounters with Nairobians like Josephat, this fieldwork has revealed that even as we may critique the value of “crisis” to adequately account for the way that African cities take shape, there may remain an ethics to naming crisis that is sidestepped by recent anthropological interest in thinking it otherwise.

Figure 3. Photo by James Muriuki.

Over the past decade, Nairobi has simultaneously been reshaped by a high-rise construction boom and a parallel spate of building collapses. All around the city, fields are becoming high-rises and corrugated iron shacks are replaced by tenements. [Fig. 3] But skylines can be fragile: high-rise dreams are cratered by piles of rubble. These collapses are happening at a time when city authorities are re-imagining Nairobi as a “world-class” city of spectacular infrastructure and gleaming high-rises, inspired by neoliberal models of urban development in cities like Dubai and Kuala Lumpur. Increasingly a destination for global capital, Nairobi’s high-end real estate sector has exploded in recent years. Yet at the same time, the city is marked by rising land values, population growth, an affordable housing shortage, and skyrocketing inflation, which are intensifying the challenges of making life workable for the city’s urban majority. When high-rises collapse, the gross disparity between global city dreams and the everyday lives of ordinary Nairobians is materialized.

Figure 4. Photo by James Muriuki.

One of the fastest growing cities in the world, Nairobi has seen its urban land values grow exponentially. This has meant that the real estate market has started to build upwards: in wealthier and middle-class neighborhoods such as Spring Valley, Kilimani, or Kileleshwa, large plots containing detached family villas have been sold off to developers and high-end apartment blocks constructed in their place. In Nairobi’s informal settlements, which have long been shaped by a commercial, if illicit, rental market of corrugated iron, single-story structures (see Amis 1984), multi-story tenement blocks have started to dominate. The majority of low-income Nairobians are now housed in low quality, but highly profitable, single-room rental units built with little regard for regulations and planning (Mwau and Sverdlik 2020). [Fig 4] The result is extremely high-density vertical neighborhoods of structurally precarious architecture, in areas that were already lacking in basic services, such as running water, sewerage, or adequate electricity (Huchzermeyer 2008). It is these neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of a series of building collapses occurring at a rate of three or four a year, generated by a murky assemblage of inadequate foundations, inappropriate building materials, regulatory inadequacy and an illicit construction industry that drives a particularly aggressive form of residential capitalism (Smith 2020). [Fig 5]

Figure 5. Photo by Constance Smith.

In the rush to build, outrageous shortcuts are being taken. But there are also questions of how such precarious skylines relate to the wider landscape of a city in the midst of a chronic housing crisis: since the colonial era, housing in Nairobi has failed to keep pace with the rate of urbanization, resulting in serious overcrowding. Today, roughly 60 percent of the city’s population lives on just 6 percent of its land (Urban Pathways 2019). These inequities are entrenched and compounded by forms of spatial authority and infrastructural violence that have their roots in colonial urban governance and through which arrangements of urban marginalization and injustice persist (Kimari 2021). In Nairobi as in many African cities, planning policies and building regulations are anti-poor in the sense that they exclude low-income groups from security of tenure, quality housing, or access to services (Watson 2009). The property sector is marked by a “revolving door” between politics and business, implicating politicians in land acquisitions, procurement and contracting, as well as in the extraction of profit (Pitcher 2017). For example, when the current President, William Ruto, was Vice-President in the previous administration, a property development company in which he was an investor was linked to a land-grabbing scandal when a primary school playground was seized for the construction of a hotel car park (Fontein et al. 2023, chapter 1). Though it received more public critique than usual, the incident was far from unique. A former government flagship project to build a “world-class” high-rise techno-city on the fringes of Nairobi was rife with accusations of bid rigging, profiteering, procurement scandals, and other irregularities involving local senators and government ministers (Mulupi 2012; Onyango 2018). [Fig 5]

Figure 6. Photo by Constance Smith.

In such ways, the promise of Nairobi as a future global city is shown to be literally superficial: the surface of the vision may be of gleaming high-rises, but these promises are shown to be illusory, riven with forms of deception and public mistrust, that literally undermine the integrity of the city, sometimes hiding a dangerous precarity underneath  (Smith 2023b). More broadly, the manipulation and extraction of geological materials—quarrying stone and sand, the excavation of vast quantities of earth for foundations, and a globally escalating concrete industry—underpin Nairobi’s high-rise urbanism, linking the acute failures of collapse to engagements with geological and anthropocenic time. [Fig 6] The carbon footprint of concrete makes it one of the worst contributors to anthropogenic climate change, which in turn is understood to be intensifying extreme weather events in Kenya and raising flood risks (Kiptum et al. 2023). Powerful seasonal flooding in Nairobi can literally undermine the foundations of tenement buildings and makes collapses more likely (Fontein et al. 2023, chapter 1). In a city riven by immoral economies of housing, ecological breakdown, and derelictions of political care, we can see how to tenants of precarious buildings such as Josephat, different modalities and temporalities of what we might term crisis are not conjectural concerns but underpin the experience of daily life.

As Janet Roitman (2017, 23) and others have observed, in many African contexts, crisis has become so pervasive that it is understood—by anthropologists and other commentators, but also by publics—not as a statistical event or set of indicators, but as a lived condition. As such, it is less a moment of rupture than a defining characteristic of the last decades: a chronic temporal condition, an enduring crisis. This narrative took shape in the 1990s, as part of a wider discourse about Africa as a continent of failed states, in which crisis—in various forms—was understood to be both pervasive and persistent, and it still casts a long shadow (Roitman 2017; see also Fontein and Smith 2023). The problem of seeing crisis in this way, Roitman cautions, is that it presumes a “normal” state of affairs in which everything works.

Rather than critiquing the fundaments of practices that beget economic recession or ecological collapse, narratives of crisis categorize the effects of such practices in terms of aberration or error. For African cities, the crisis literature regarded urban Africa as a spatial embodiment of failure, places of abjection, crisis, and despair, where the tenets of modernization had failed to adhere (see Nuttall and Mbembe 2008). But what was this norm against which crisis was to be measured? What was needed were alternative ways of thinking about agency, the urban subject, and ways of being and becoming that didn’t reduce everyday life to a deviation from a “normal” established elsewhere. That is what it would mean, Mbembe and Nuttall (2004) argued, to “write the world from an African metropolis”: to move away from teleological trajectories of progress and development (or the crises afflicting them) and think about forms of city-making that were more open-ended and provisional, in which the incomplete or the broken did not equate to failure but could be apprehended as a site of emergence (see also Guma 2020).

And yet—and yet. This literature has undoubtedly been a powerful corrective and has done much to foreground the lives and experiences of urban Africans in a way that the focus on structures and systems did not. But what does it mean to think crisis otherwise when faced with a pile of rubble? What does it mean to reframe such an event as nonconformity or alterity and not as disaster? In their conceptualization of “crisis-ordinary,” Lauren Berlant (2011) proposed that current times are characterized by the tumult of crisis, but without its exceptionality. As Berlant, Roitman, and many others have shown, exception and aberration are heavily loaded terms and can often focus attention on “what went wrong,” rather than deeper analysis.

But don’t we also owe it to people like Josephat to ask such questions? Collapsing housing should be exceptional. If Josephat names it a crisis, as an ethnographer is there not an ethics of care for me to take his terminology seriously? In thinking through the politics and discourses of housing crises over the past few years, I have been tracking what failure and crisis set in motion—following what they do, rather than what they mean, and how they influence emergent forms of urban transformation (Smith and Woodcraft 2020; Smith 2023a). This approach renders crisis an empirical terrain rather than a pre-established category, opening up possibilities to probe how it becomes constituted as an object of knowledge and a tool for apprehending the world at large. Definitions of crisis act in the world, forming new assemblages. Might following crisis, and what it sets in motion, even help us to unravel such notions as “emergence” and “thinking otherwise” (see Roitman 2017)? In Nairobi, this may connect acute crises of housing failure with extractive real estate speculation, the urgency of climate collapse and the long durée of the geological Anthropocene as seen from urban Africa. Taken together, this might offer new perspectives on our understanding of the relationship between crisis and urban transformation.

Constance Smith is a Senior Lecturer and UKRI Future Leader Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research explores landscapes of architecture, time and urban change with a particular interest in participatory and practice-led research in collaboration with artists, communities and urban practitioners. Her work has been widely published and has featured in several exhibitions, including at the National Museums of Kenya.

James Muriuki is a Nairobi-based art practitioner. His practice focuses on the transition of society through materials and objects, exploring the social landscape. His work takes up forms such as architecture and constructions as visual elements and metaphorical symbols that are an illustration of human capacity, desire and aspirations. He is an alumnus of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre of Curatorial Leadership, Fellowship and Training.

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