Lester Kanali Master of Urban Design

Urban Attachments: The Spatial Logic of Intra-formal Informality in Nairobi

Nairobi’s planned housing estates are increasingly accommodating informal extensions, yet these adaptations remain poorly reflected in contemporary planning and urban design. This dissertation examines how informal residential and commercial attachments develop in Nairobi, focusing on the relationship between existing spatial structure and self-building. It interrogates the colonial planning legacies, land politics and elite patronage networks that continue to script where and how this happens.

Using morphological mapping, satellite-imagery analysis and streetscape analysis across three Nairobi estates, spanning colonial public housing to contemporary private subdivision, the research traces how residents extend, enclose and embed informal structures within planned layouts, and how institutional neglect and extra-legal governance enable this territorial appropriation over time.

Findings show these attachments as sophisticated, self-organising responses to inherited spatial injustice, rather than decay. Yet current Nairobi planning practice continues to treat informality as failure, not knowledge. The dissertation argues that recognising this spatial logic is essential to confronting the politics of exclusion still embedded in the city’s formal development.