Global Urbanization

Chapter 10. Tracking Regional Growth and Development: The Nairobi Case

C h a p t e r 1 0 Tracking Regional Growth and Development: The Nairobi Case Wilber K. Ottichilo Fast-growing Nairobi, Kenya, the most populous city in East Africa, offers an important example of how a municipality that lacks modern maps and databases turns to spatial technologies, especially remotesensing and geographic information system (GIS) technologies, to track urban growth and development and inform public and private infrastructure investments and other decision-making. The recent adoption of these tools has assisted in the management of a city that in less than one hundred years has burgeoned from a British colonial capital of 10,500 population to a modernizing metropolis with over 3 million inhabitants. This case can serve as a guide to other cities, especially in Africa, with rapid but inadequately documented growth. Background on Nairobi Founded in 1899, Nairobi has experienced a population trajectory through the twentieth century that has accelerated in the past four decades . Between 1906 and 1936 the number of its inhabitants grew threefold ; between 1936 and 1962, fourfold. But after independence in 1963, the increase was tenfold as the city moved from a quarter of a million to its current 3.1 million people (Molumbe 2000). Land consumption accompanied the population growth. In 1906, Nairobi covered an area of 18 square kilometers. However, there have been several boundary expansions since then. In 1927, the town area was extended to 78 square kilometers. In 1963, it grew to approximately 690 square kilometers (UNDP 1997). In addition to population and geographic changes, other unrecorded 168 Urban Spatial Growth and Development Table 10.1 Population Growth in Nairobi, 1948–2010 Change per period Change since independence Year Population (percent) (percent using 1965 base) 1948 119,000 1955 186,000 56% 1957 221,700 19% 1960 251,000 13% 1962 266,800 7% 1965 380,000 42% 1969 509,300 34% 34% 1979 827,775 63% 118% 1989 1,324,570 60% 249% 1995 1,810,000 37% 376% 1999 2,143,254 18% 464% 2005 2,750,561 28% 624% 2010 3,240,155 18% 753% Source: Kenya National Bureau of Statistics 2010. demographic conditions complicate management of this city and occasion administrative difficulties in planning and implementing local public services. For example, the daytime population or transients commuting from the surrounding regions is higher than the resident population . In another example, rural-urban migration continues alongside natural increase to contribute to population growth, but neither the number of newcomers who settle in new or existing squatter settlements nor the newborns are recorded very frequently (Obudho 1999). Nairobi is divided into several districts: residential, the CBD, and industrial areas. The residential areas hold low-, middle-, and highincome households. It is estimated that 80 percent of the population living in high-density settlements occupies less than 20 percent of the residential land area; but about 55 percent of the urban population is housed in unplanned, informal settlements/slums (Badiane 2008, 7). The main feature of these informal settlements is the lack of such infrastructure and services as water, sewage, and solid waste disposal. The original frame of the city was determined by the dictates colonial practice. Racial segregation was paramount and lasted to the early 1960s. Enforced by zoning and property laws, these policies created land-use patterns that prevail to the present (Emig and Ismail 1980). Nairobi was systematically racially zoned in the major plans of 1905, 1927, and 1948. In 1902, as the colonial government claimed ownership of all land under its jurisdiction, it enacted the Crown Lands Ordinance that granted long-term leases to Europeans and short-term ‘‘licenses’’ to natives. Further, this law stated that each ‘‘native license,’’ or permit to Tracking Regional Growth: Nairobi 169 use the land, allowed only a five-acre plot maximum. It was not until 1954 that Africans were allowed to own leasehold property in Nairobi (Amis 1990). The predictable result of these residential planning processes is an extremely unequal land distribution. Evidence of this inequality is evident in Nairobi today, where, even after independence, the availability of land remains severely restricted by previous contractual agreements and high prices. As for Nairobi’s socioeconomic role in Kenya, the city’s functions have expanded to such an extent that it has become the country’s primate city. It holds 38 percent of Kenya’s urban population and is three times more populous than the next largest city, Mombasa...