Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi

This article sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest “permissive spaces” for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings. As such, it opens up a view on the way police violence is entrenched in local tensions and conflict, which adds to analyses of police killings that explore public concerns over crime, political mechanization, and individual motivations. Hence, the focus on police killings as a bordering practice highlights the interaction between police work and the local vicissitudes of bordering and bounding and how these pertain to the production of city- and ghettoscapes

'We are not Kenyans': Extra-judicial Killings, Manhood and Citizenship'.

This article focuses on the systematic police killings of young, male crime suspects by local police officers in Mathare since 2002. It explores the relationship between executions of young ghetto men by police and notions of citizenship. It firstexmaines the impact of such killings on positions of manhood among these men and the different roles of ‘gangs’ in popular processes of becoming men. My aim is to move away from the current association of young ghetto men with violence and ethnic politics—i.e. as ‘thugs for hire’. One of my main discoveries was that work and manhood are at least as important to grasp processes of group formation among them. After this, the article delves into the question of how to understand the narratives that legitimise and perpetuate this particular form of state violence. It concludes by discussing how processes of subjectivation that constitute, and are constituted by, the dominant discourse on citizenship produce positions of non-citizenship ascribed to ghetto residents, and in particular to young ghetto men

‘When the Numbers Stop Adding’: Imagining Futures in Perilous Presents Among Youth in Nairobi Ghettos

Studying the aspirations of young men, in Mathare, Nairobi, highlights their social becoming in contexts in which they incessantly risk social and physical death. Taking aspiration as a relational concept brings into view the temporal and spatial interactions between different aspirations and how these connect to emerging and future pathways of these young men. The ensuing relationalities at play are analysed through their context-bound negotiations of dominant gender norms to elucidate how these inform their social navigation towards male respectability, now and in the future. Adding the dimension of positionality here is useful to bring out how individual negotiations of gender norms in space and over time allows a nuanced view on situated entanglements of aspirations, pathways and dominant discourses and how these convolute and intensify in particular decision-making processes. The analyses are based on longitudinal ethnographic research with youth gangs in Nairobi for four months annually on average since 2005

Adaptive governance by community based organisations:Community resilience initiatives during Covid-19 in Mathare, Nairobi

Adaptive governance describes the purposeful collective actions to resist, adapt, or transform when faced with shocks. As governments are reluctant to intervene in informal settlements, community based organisations (CBOs) self-organize and take the lead. This study explores under what conditions CBOs in Mathare informal settlement, Nairobi initiate and sustain resilience activities during Covid-19. Study findings show that CBOs engage in multiple resilience activities, varying from maladaptive and unsustainable to adaptive, and transformative. Two conditions enable CBOs to initiate resilience activities: bonding within the community and coordination with other actors. To sustain these activities over 2.5 years of Covid-19, CBOs also require leadership, resources, organisational capacity, and network capacity. The same conditions appear to enable CBOs to engage in transformative activities. However, CBOs cannot transform urban systems on their own. An additional condition, not met in Mathare, is that governments, NGOs, and donor agencies facilitate, support, and build community capacities.</p

Keeping Feet Dry: Rotterdam’s Experience in Flood Risk and Resilience Building

Rotterdam City in the South of Holland is one of the most vibrant cities you will find in the Netherlands. The city has gone through a transformation from the time it was bombed in the 1940s up to the time that a part of the city was flooded in 1953. Through extensive rebuilding and the Delta Plan project, the city has been well protected against any flooding disaster that may come. However, how resilient really is Rotterdam? Through in-depth interviews of key stakeholders in the City of Rotterdam, the study investigates the collective engagement in the city and how this has helped shape Rotterdam’s position in urban resilience. The study used the Collective Engagement Urban Resilience Framework as a framework to understand how disaster prone cities transform itself to become disaster resilient

Reclaiming the city from an urban vitalism perspective: critically reflecting smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just city labels

This article analyses four of the most prominent city discourses and introduces the lens of urban vitalism as an overarching interdisciplinary concept of cities as places of transformation and change. We demonstrate the value of using urban vitalism as a lens to conceptualize and critically discuss different notions on smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just cities. Urban vitalism offers a process-based lens which enables us to understand cities as places of transformation and change, with people and other living beings at its core. The aim of the article is to explore how the lens of vitalism can help us understand and connect ongoing interdisciplinary academic debates about urban development and vice versa, and how these ongoing debates inform our understanding of urban vitalism