Home of last resort: Urban land conflict and the Nubians in Kibera, Kenya

Abstract

Amid expansive and often informal urban growth, conflict over land has become a severe source of instability in many cities. In slum areas, policies intended to alleviate tensions, including upgrading programs, the legal regulation of informal tenure arrangements, and the reform of local governance structures, have had the unintended consequence of also spurring violence and conflict. This paper analyzes the conflict over a proposed 'ethnic homeland' for the Nubian community in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, in order to advance knowledge on the strategies communities adopt to promote their interests and how such strategies impact on urban conflict management. Theoretically, we apply the perspective of 'institutional bricolage', which captures how actors make use of existing formal and informal structures in pragmatic ways to meet their conflict management needs. While previous research focuses primarily on how bricolage can facilitate cooperation, the case analysis uncovers how over time, the land issue has become closely intertwined with claims of identity and citizenship and a political discourse drawn along ethnic lines. In turn, such processes may contribute to the intractability of conflict, causing significant challenges for urban planning.

The potential for scaling up container‐based sanitation in informal settlements in Kenya

“…Underneath the formal ownership of the land by the national government in informal settlements, often local and national politicians are the major owners of buildings as ‘slumlords’, making them an arena for political mobilisation around election time. This has been particularly important in the rising of Raila Odinga, leader of the opposition, who has mobilised Kibera (where Sanergy work) as one of his key strongholds (Elfversson & Höglund, 2018). This can often lead to expanding populations and voters of tribal groups being moved into informal settlements in the run‐up to elections.…”

Urban Development Project Evaluation Using Multi-Stakeholder Cost–Benefit Analysis

“…The fundamental difference between the applications of CBA in this research and previous studies lies in determining the cost and benefit components associated with the interests of diverse stakeholders. As previous studies suggested, mapping and assessing various stakeholders are essential in studying urban development conflicts and evaluations (Elfversson and Höglund, 2018;Lombard and Rakodi, 2016;Nae, Dumitrache et al, 2019;Yuan, Chen et al, 2018;Zepharovich, Ceddia et al, 2021).…”

Food Systems in Informal Urban Settlements—Exploring Differences in Livelihood Welfare Factors across Kibera, Nairobi

“…The change of administration in the Kibera area in the beginning of 1928 from a military to civil society was lacking local authority to administer the area, which led to an administrative grey area where tax was not collected. This opened the area up to the indigenous tribes of Kenya who intensively moved into Nairobi in search of work [45]. Given the difficulties in resettling the Nubian population in Kibera, the government stopped distributing residence permits to family members of the war veterans and neglected the steady supply of water and sewerage to force the residents to resettle elsewhere, with an intention of eventually dismantling Kibera as a housing site and opening the area for the expansion of Nairobi City [6,44].…”