Map Kibera

We are very exciting to announce that Map Kibera has won an Award of Distinction for Digital Communities in the Ars Electronica!

Ars Electronica is a long running exhibition and award for digital media arts, and we’re proud to be included among familiar awesome projects like FixMyStreet, ToR, fellow field project BOSCO, and the CCC, as well as many fascinating and bizarre sounding projects of which we’ve never heard! Linz is going to be crazy fun.

Reading the absolutely fascinating history of Sudanese settlement in Kibera, Kibra is Our Blood, and more generally the bizarre land policies of the British Colonial administration (listed on Brian’s excellent Kibera bibliography. The names of familiar places and some of the parallel world might-have-beens spin out thoughts of historical digital mapping of this article, to visualize this incredible history, parallel to some of the techniques I’m hacking on to deal with new Map Kibera data … scanning colonial era maps and rectifying, linking text to OpenStreetMap objects, or rather to OpenHistoricalMap.

The article makes clear the roots of Kibera’s present situation in ambiguous and confusing land tenure and the formal city’s dependency on marginalized populations; the contentious issues are strikingly familiar. It’s an article, among many about Kibera, that people in Kibera should have to read and understand. Some standout quotes to me…

Comparing Kibera’s standing to other historic informal settlements. (p. 91)

It is interesting to compare the resiliency of Kibera to the fate of Kileleshwa, a neighborhood of Nairobi that is now solidly upper-class but in the 1920’s was another informal settlement of “detribalized Natives”….Without the protection of military patronage, the African residents of Kileleshwa could do little to stand up to their influential European neighbors, who complained that the Native settlement was a breeding ground for crime and disease. In 1927, the location’s entire population was evicted forcibly under the “Resident Natives Ordinance”.

On the failed idea to settle Nubian’s to what is now Nairobi National Park. (p. 93)

In 1931, the game warden of Nairobi protested the proposal to settle the Sudanese on the Nairobi Commonage because it was the only part of the Southern Game Reserve that did not belong to the Maasai, and as such it was the only practical site in the entire region for a game sanctuary … the preservation of wildlife won out over the interests of the Kiberan Sudanese, and the Nairobi Commonage is known today as Nairobi National Park.

Addressing schemes in Kibera have long been protested. Does it all come down to who is doing the numbering? (p.94)

Kiberans holding legal residence permits received round metal door plates stamped with the letters “KAR” and numbered from 1-350 … Many rejected the registration discs as an insulting form of “kipande” (labor registration).

On a request for “community policing”, in an increasingly crime ridden 1930s Kibera, especially the illegal brewing of “Nubian Gin”. (p. 98)

This request highlighted the ambiguous position of the Sudanese in Kenya. As “detribalized Natives” and former servents of the government, they were able to secure a privileged position in Kibera, but, on the other hand, their “detribalized status” also menat that they lacked officially recognized “traditional authorities” through which to control their community.

The denial of services to Kibera, again flimsily justified by the brewing of illegal “Nubian Gin”. (p. 103)

The government therefore turned down the community’s request for a permanent water supply, and instead offered to assist any resident to move to a different Native location where there was water. Thus, by the close of the decade, the Sudanese had fended off the government’s attempts to either move them or regulate their lives more closely at the cost of their quality of life. The administration began a policy of what can only be considered malicious neglect in an attempt to force the Sudanese out by rendering Kibera unlivable.

The economic opportunities of informal settlements…(p. 108)

Their prosperity was also, however, due to the unregulated status of Kibera, which created lucrative commercial opportunities. Outside the jurisdication of the Livestock Control Board, its butchers sold cheaper, uninspected, and uncontrolled meat. Moreover, the explosion in Nairobi’s African urban population in the later half of the 1940’s provided lucrative real estate opportunities as the Sudanese rented rooms to prostitutes, labor migrants and other non-Sudanese Africans who drifted into Nairobi.

Ethnic relations have long been fluid. (p. 114)

Yet it appears that the Sudanese were not as isolated from the rest of the African community as they claimed to be. While the Kibera Survey declared that the Kibera Sudanese rarely intermarried with other ethnic groups, there is strong evidence to indicate that Sudanese community was much more open than they officially admitted. Most Sudanese came to Kenya as part of military expeditions, with limited opportunities to bring Sudanese women with them. While there were cases where veterans returned to the Sudan to find wives, many married women from Kenyan ethnic groups.

With the near coming of Independence, the ongoing struggle and political football between the military, colonial administration, and Nairobi city council, started to wipe the slate clean. The Ministry of Housing introduced plans to house 75,000 residents in Kibera, but only five model homes were built in Kibera. Wonder if these still exist. (p.120) Toward the end, the Nubians increasingly aligned themselves with the British, as a new Kenyan government would not recognize their military debts.

“What would it take to map an entire country?”

With the growing visibility of Map Kibera, that question is coming more frequently, especially in Africa, where both OpenStreetMap and traditional mapping are widely absent. This is a massive question, which is going to depend very much on circumstances of that country, and on who is asking that question; and in the end may be better answered by a different question. In response to a couple queries, from Liberia and Malawi, I decided to write up a few blog posts to start off those conversations, and serve as reference for any of the other 200+ countries on this planet. To start, going look at a few examples to serve as models for answering the question.

Up front, the question assumes one very important thing; the historical; growth pattern of OSM isn’t happening. Traditionally, a few individuals had their minds blown by a conference presentation on OSM, or maybe a random blog post somewhere, and they start mapping their home town. And when that looks to be a big task, and they start eyeing the next town, they start recruiting others through mapping parties. A mailing list is set up. The virus starts to spread, and OSM might get the attention of a local government or two, maybe some companies, and soon, the country is well on its way to being mapped. The growth is organic. It might take years. The preconditions are important. Roughly, there has been an active community already of technically proficient people who have leisure time, perhaps already contributing to open source projects. In other countries, there may not be a technical community, or socioeconomic conditions make leisure time a valuable and scarce. Other places may be in conflict. These are places where people start to consider intentional interventions to get mapping going.

post continues on Brain Off…