• Plans to construct 'Nairobi Railway City' overlook the principle of public participation
Returning to Nairobi after a four-year absence, one cannot help but notice all the new highrise buildings that have shot up in the CBD and surrounding areas.
If I didn't know better, I would have thought that the economy was booming and the economy of Nairobi had achieved a situation of full employment.
The fact is that increasingly, businesses are abandoning the CBD and many of the new buildings, as well as older ones, including landmark sites, such as what used to be the Hilton Hotel and the former Hotel Intercontinental, are sitting empty.
Alarm bells were already ringing six years ago, when a report by commercial property service company Broll Kenya spoke of parts of the city, including Upper Hill, feeling the pinch of oversupply, with high office vacancies.
From where I sit, it seems that the inner city Nairobi is well on its way to a long, slow and painful process of urban decline.
Globally, this has occurred in many inner cities, where there has been a lack of investment and maintenance, leading to a decline in population numbers.
The government seems to have finally cottoned on to this state of affairs, as can been seen from recent comments by Prime CS Musalia Mudavadi during his trip to London.
Mudavadi spoke of plans to redevelop the 200-acre prime property that currently serves as the Nairobi Railway Station into something he and our former colonial masters-turned-development partners are calling the Nairobi Railway City (NRC).
According to reports: “The project’s concept arose from growing concerns regarding the rapid growth of Nairobi City, thus the need to start thinking beyond city boundaries.”
In theory, the NRC might be a good idea. In practice, however, and having seen what I have of Nairobi CBD and its environs, if it was up to me, I’d shelve those plans and instead focus on reinvigorating the existing CBD.
For the benefit of those who may not be aware, there was a time the CBD was not just offices and shops, but, like many global cities, including London, which seems to be Mudavadi's benchmark for his new project, also residential.
At some point in Nairobi, we seem to have decided that people shouldn’t live in the CBD, and if you ask me, that was when the seeds for the urban decline were sown.
That said, the situation in Nairobi is not beyond salvage, and if properly handled, there could even be a time in the not-too-distant future when the NRC could be an ideal and useful development instead of the pie in the sky it appears to be.
I don’t know if Nairobi Governor Johnson Sakaja or members of his team were part of Mudavadi’s delegation to London. I believe that by right, they should have at least been consulted. After all, Nairobi is their direct responsibility.
There used to be a body called the Nairobi Central Business District Association. I don’t know what their current status is, but if they still exist, they could also be useful in this process.
At the same time, I think it might be useful to consult the people of Nairobi about what sort of CBD they want.
The idea of public consultation seems to be an elusive one for Kenyan leaders, but it has been done with regard to the future of Nairobi in living memory.
If I recall correctly, the last time this was done was 30 years ago, during the Nairobi City Convention, also known as "the Nairobi we want" meeting. And even that was an NGO-driven process rather than government initiative.
Our leaders need to be made aware that while it is all very well for them to dream up Railway Cities and the like, no such policy should be decided without the full and direct participation of members of those affected by such a policy.
We need to normalise or institutionalise the idea of “nothing about us without us”.