Almost seven kilometers from the green of Uhuru Park in central Nairobi, lies the informal settlement of Kibera. It is an area whose urban character consists of corrugated iron roofs, mud walls, and a complicated network of utility poles. Kibera, at this point in time, is a well-known place. Much has been written and researched on this “city within a city,” from its infrastructural issues to its navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic.
.jpg?1651830269 "Khayelitsha Township - Cape Town. Image © Olga Ernst under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.")
Kibera is frequently labeled as the biggest informal settlement in Africa, courtesy of its estimated population of 1 million as quoted by many NGOs active in the area. A GIS-assisted survey, however, puts that number at closer to 200,000, a figure backed by a 2009 census. And that is a problem. This discrepancy in numbers raises unsettling adjacent questions, on how informal settlements can be over-researched, how the architecture of low-income communities in the Global South can be fetishized, and how – ultimately – the material conditions of these settlements see little concrete improvement.
