Changing Cities: Climate, Youth, and Land Markets in Urban Areas
basis if necessary. All these actors contribute to the making of Kibera’s property markets (which are far more complex than just the selling and buying of structures) and the material and lived experiences of urban dwellers. This empirical exploration offers two key findings. The first is that people “construct” or highlight identities within the market as a tool by which to negotiate claims. Depending on the question asked, people can identify themselves as tenants and structure owners (e.g., those described above) call upon other simultaneous and often uniquely urban identities (e.g., tribe, gender, collective rural imaginary, personal or community relationship to “landed” history, language, and socioeconomic status) as tools and leverage in claim-making processes. As Kibera is often people’s first and only entry point into the city, the construct of these identities are often integrally related to their lived experience of urbanism in Kibera. Second, vested power has accumulated in the market, and specific actors, identities, and roles are marginalized in this process. However, though Kibera’s market may not be working well, it is supplying a vast amount of housing to many people in the city. Although tenants are highly disadvantaged in their ability to bargain and negotiate, most report that the affordability of Kibera outweighs its more negative features. Both these findings should be considered when designing interventions to improve the functioning of land markets and conditions in the settlement.
ADDRESSING THE DYSFUNCTIONAL LAND MARKETS IN KIBERA
Although Kibera undoubtedly supplies housing to thousands of people and offers an entry point to the city for thousands more, in no way does this presuppose that intervention is unnecessary. As the research demonstrates, the state has always played an active role in Kibera’s markets, not only through the day-to-day functions of local chiefs and councilors but also through the history of constructed advantage and the vesting of interest at the scale of the city and the settlement. Reconstructing engagement is a perpetual process of testing strategies of urban governance. As one begins to envision more exactly how this new engagement should be configured, AbdouMaliqu Simone reminds us that “African cities—simultaneously demonstrating marked development and decline—– constitute particular kinds of frontiers that operate as a gravitational force | 134 |