When economists shut off your water
Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs.
Access to water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. The World Bank, Nairobi Water Company, and development economists exploited this unjust context to treat poor Kenyans like guinea pigs.
The planned demolition of one of Ethiopia’s most vibrant cultural centers forms part of an urban planning trend where African cities are re-designed to serve elites.
Successive Ethiopian governments have continued a 'modernizing' project that not only offers people false dreams, but actively dislocates them from the things that gave them purpose in the past.
In his new book ‘The Blinded City,’ Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon takes readers into inner city Johannesburg not as it was or could be, but as it is.
In South Africa, land occupiers are evicted from their homes in the name of housing delivery. On the Africa Is a Country Podcast this week, we attempt to understand why.
Marcel Paret’s book, "Fragmented Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa after Racial Inclusion," tries to make sense of politics in South African urban informal settlements.
Urban displacements greatly diminish the living conditions of already desperate populations living on the brink of poverty in Kenya's capital.
The film, 'We are Zama Zama,' about illegal miners in South Africa, is a social commentary on the failures of post-colonial liberal democracies in Southern Africa.
In a country like South Africa where government trust is low, gangsters and criminals who provide assistance to their communities are seen as the people’s champions.
In the last video for our Nairobi edition of Capitalism in My City, we meet the Organic Intellectuals Network.
In the second video from our Capitalism In My City project, Dennis Esikuri talks to everyday Nairobians about the current employment opportunities in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic.
South Africans fight for “adequate housing,” freedom from eviction, and a government that will progressively realize both of these goals.
Why is Nairobi's government terrorizing hawkers and hustlers around the city? An anthropological perspective.
In the first video from a series for the Capitalism In My City project, Brian Mathenge decodes what everyday capitalism looks like from the margins of Nairobi.
Drug use among young people in Nairobi's slums is on the rise. Youth also face arbitrary arrests by the police, resulting in jail time which turns them into hardcore criminals in a vicious cycle.
I’ve lived a good part of my life in Mathare 4A, part of the larger Mathare slum in Nairobi. Decent housing remains a pipe dream for the majority of the city's residents.
How is it that water flows freely and cheaply in Nairobi's wealthy neighborhoods, but thousands of people in informal settlements are denied access to it?
The destruction of Tarkwa Bay in Lagos and the battle over what makes a city and who belongs in it.
The politics of local resistance in urban South Africa: Evidence from three informal settlements.
The periodic evictions of poor families in Nairobi follows in a long tradition in Kenya, dating to colonialism, to keep the city as a space for the elite.