Migration Shaping the City
Lars Müller Publishers
Published in September 2012
Edited by Manuel Herz
In cooperation with ETH Studio Basel
The following essay firstly endeavors to depict how these different urban patterns and the emerging multiple power systems were formed through migration. Four illustrative case studies will be examined—the neighborhoods of Kibera, the un Blue zone, Eastleigh, and the central business district (CBd)—revealing how the urbanization of nairobi as a whole has developed.
Nairobi, in its short history spanning just over one hundred years, has grown to be one of the most varied and international cities of our contemporary world. Migration has been shown as one of the key forces influencing the city. In the context of Nairobi’s complex colonial and postindependence political trajectory, migration has reinforced ethnic, spatial, and economic differences, leading to the formation of multiple power structures. This process is evident in the city’s radically different urban patterns. The book documents, along specific neighborhoods, how different cultures of urban life constitute the city today.
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The case of Kibera—one of the largest slums of Africa—investigates rural-urban and urban-urban migration and its relationship to the urban poverty which is formalized by multiple urban actors from inside and outside of Kibera’s borders. The un Blue zone, on the other hand, illustrates how the presence of global institutions, such as the united nations and numerous other nGos in Nairobi, directly influences the local urban space and economy and generates a migration of professionals and experts. The case of Eastleigh conveys how the vivid urbanization of this neighborhood is driven by the in-migration of Somali refugees from isolated camps close to the city of dadaab into nairobi and, consequently, portrays the refugees as an urban catalyst.
The study on the central business district focuses on the modernist buildings that were produced in the 1960s and ’70s and how their architecture, which was meant to express and construct a new national identity for the new independent nation, is in fact the result of international influences of foreign architects and engineers, as well as migrant workers. The CBd case also serves to document an exceptional architectural oeuvre that has as yet hardly received attention.
The study concludes by identifying the parallel processes of urban- ization of Kibera, Eastleigh, the Blue zone, and the central business district as exemplifying cases for multiple power systems that contribute to nairobi’s urban formation as a city.
