Negotiating the City:

Urban Planning and Dwelling amidst China-built infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya

As a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University jointly with the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, I am currently undertaking my second research project on the practices of urban planning and dwelling in Nairobi vis-à-vis China-built and funded infrastructure in Kenya. Titled Negotiating the City: Urban Planning and Dwelling amidst China-built infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya, the research project aims at illustrating the ways in which China-funded or built infrastructure is shaping the planning of Nairobi as a city by considering which visions of development and models of urban governance – including patterns of inclusion and exclusion – it promotes.

Central to the analysis is assessing to what extent the transnationalization of urban expertise is promoting a new form of urban governance and a new order in urban Kenya against the backdrop of the promises of infrastructural development. The project further shows the ways in which recipients, in particular Nairobi city dwellers, are espousing, appropriating, or contesting these models of urban planning according to their dwelling practices, future aspirations, and visions of development, while assessing emerging possibilities of mobilization. Overall, the original contribution of my project lies in a multidisciplinary, dialectical examination of the negotiations of the city among actors across scales of analysis – the ‘producers’ of infrastructure at the institutional level and the ‘users’ at the grassroots.