Background Reading

From Map Kibera

Revision as of 12:28, 12 February 2010

Books

Planet of Slums, Mike Davis

Damning account of housing and economic policies.

Shadow Cities

Quote, p81-82

A few years ago, the Water and Sanitation Program, a nonprofit affiliated with the United Nations and the World Bank, became interested in the water supply question in Kibera. The group issued a report on Kibera's water kiosks. By reading the fine print, you can determine how much Kibera people -- and by extension, residents of all the mud hut communities of Nairobi -- are being ripped off by the kiosk system. At 3 shillings per jerry can, Kibera residents pay 10 times more for water than the average person in a wealthy neighborhood with municipally supplied, metered water service. And that's when water is plentiful. When there's a shortage, metered rates don't go up, but the prices in Kibera do. So at those times people in Kibera pay 30 or 40 times the official price of water.

The group published a brochure about the study. They presented it to local and national politicians. There was only one bunch of people who never saw the study: the residents of Kibera.

Japeth Mbuvi, Operations Analyst for the program, explained why. "Our audience for this was not the people of Kibera, but the political structure," he told me. Then he added, "Anyway, maybe it's better not to publicize this: there could be riots."

I applaud Mbuvi for his frankness. He is one of the few people I have met at any of the large nonprofit agencies who was willing to be candid about his agency's shortcomings as well as its achievements.

Still, there's something sad about his concern.

Perhaps it's true that people in Kibera could riot over water. After all, Kibera has been the scenes of riots in the past -- most of them involving landlord tenant issue -- and scores of people have been murdered in the melees. Still, Kibera's people deserve to know the facts about their lives. What's the point of studying the water kiosks of Kibera if, when the study is done, the information is not shared with the people who most at stake?

Reports

The Challenge of Slums, UN-Habitat http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/getPage.asp?page=bookView&book=1156

Brian Ekdale's Bibliography

Literature related to Kibera and mapping

Kibera and Nairobi History Bodewes, D. (2005). Parish transformation in urban slums: Voices of Kibera, Kenya. Nairobi, Kenya: Pauline Publications Africa. (recommended)

Burton, A. (2002). The urban experience in eastern Africa, c. 1750-2000. Nairobi: The British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Chege, M. (1981). A Tale of Two Slums: Electoral Politics in Mathare and Dagoretti. Review of African Political Economy, 20, 74-88. (not on Kibera, but some interesting political history of Mathare)

Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. New York: Verso.

Furedi, F. (1973). The African crowd in Nairobi: Population movements and elite politics. Journal of African History, 14(2), 275-290.

Gatabaki-Kamau, R. & Karirah-Gitau, S. (2004). Actors and interests: The development of an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. In K. T. Hansen & M. Vaa (Eds.), Reconsidering informality: Perspectives from urban Africa. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute.

Grye, W. (2009). The social and communication networks of a grassroots organization in Kibera, Kenya. Conference paper.

Haugerud, A. (1997). The culture and politics of modern Kenya. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Kimani, S.M. (1972). The structure of land ownership in Nairobi. Journal of East African Research and Development, 2(2), 101-124.

Kitching, G. (1980). Class and economic change in Kenya. The making of an African petite-bourgeoisie. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kramer, M. (2006). Dispossessed: Life in our world’s urban slums. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Lee-Smith, D. & Lamba, D. (2000). Social transformation in a post-colonial city: The case of Nairobi. In M. Polese & R. Stern (Eds.), The social sustainability of cities: Diversity and the management of change. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Macharia, K. (1992). Slum clearance and the informal economy in Nairobi. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 30(2), 221-236. (recommended)

Muraya, P. W. K. (2006). Urban planning and small-scale enterprises in Nairobi, Kenya. Habitat International, 30, 127-143.

Neuwirth, R. (2006). Shadow cities: A billion squatters, a new urban world. New York: Routledge.

Ogot, B. A. & Ochieng, W. R. (1995). Decolonization and independence in Kenya 1940-93. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Osborn, M. (2008). Fueling the flames: Rumour and politics in Kibera. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2(2), 315-326.

Parsons, A. W. (2009). Megaslumming: A journey through sub-Saharan Africa’s largest shantytown. London: Share the World’s Resources. (available in PDF online)

Parsons, T. (1997). “Kibra is our blood”: The Sudanese military legacy in Nairobi’s Kibera location, 1902-1968. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 30(1), 87-122. (highly recommended)

Robertson, C. C. (1997). Trouble showed the way: Women, men, and trade in the Nairobi area, 1890-1990. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

UN Habitat. The challenge of global slums: global report on human settlements. (2003). Sterling, VA: Earthscan.

van Zwanenberg, R. (1972). History and theory of urban poverty in Nairobi: The problem of slum development. Journal of East African Research and Development, 2(2), 163-205.

Wangui, E.E. & Darkoh, M.B.K. (1992). A geographical study of Kibera as an example of an uncontrolled settlement. Journal of East African Research & Development , x(x), 75-91.

White, L. (1990). The comforts of home: Prostitution in colonial Nairobi. University of Chicago Press.

Zamberia, A. M. (2006). State-civil society partnerships and sustainable urban development: Lessons from Kibera, Nairobi. LWATI: A Journal of Contemporary Research, 3, 251-265.

Mapping as Representation and as Site of Contesting Power/Interests

Aitken, S. C. & Zonn, L. E. (1994). Place, power, situation, and spectacle: A geography of film. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishes, Inc. (“Mapping of Cinematic Places: Icons, Ideology, and the Power of (Mis)representation”)

Blunt, A. & Wills, J. (2000). Dissident geographies: An introduction to radical ideas and practice. New York: Prentice Hall.

Crampton, J. W. (2001). Maps as social constructions: Power, communication and visualization. Progress in Human Geography, 25(2), 235-252.

Duncan, J. & Ley, D. (1993). Place/culture/representation. New York: Routledge. (“Introduction: Representing the Place of Culture” & “Sites of Representation: Place, Time and the Discourse of the Other” & “Representing Space: Space, Scale and Culture in Social Science”)

Fabian. J. (1983). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press

Harley, J.B. (1988). Maps, knowledge, and power. In D. Cosgrove & S. Daniels (Eds.) The iconography of landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments (277-312). New York: Cambridge University Press. (recommended)

Harley, J.B. (1989). Deconstructing the map. Cartographica, 26(2), 1-20. (recommended)

Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Neocleous, M. (2003). Off the map: On violence and cartography. European Journal of Social Theory, 6(4), 409-425.

Propen, A. (2007). Visual communication and the map: How maps as visual objects convey meaning in specific contexts. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16(2), 233-254.

Schumacher, M. & Koch, M. (2004). Mapping the unmapped, seeing the unseen. In A. Borsdorf & P. Zembri (Eds.) European cities structures: Insights on outskirts (49-78).