Building Newness in Fits and Starts: Infrastructure and Temporality in Nairobi

ABSTRACT Nairobi is a rapidly changing city. The speed, magnitude, and unpredictability of the change are productive of a kind of unsettling. This unsettling is felt in the sound of drilling, the texture of the constant dust, the sight of cranes, and the unevenness of uplifted sidewalks. At the same time, as the sound, dust, and cranes persist across the city from day into night from 1 year to the next, this change is also productive of a kind of sedimentation, a resettling of the unsettling, a certainty of uncertainty and upheaval. How can we understand the processes of simultaneous rapid change and waiting taking place in Nairobi, and what are ways of thinking about the temporality of these processes? I posit an analytic of repeated fits and starts whose speed or lack of speed unsettles. In addition, I posit the temporal concept of sedimentation, or the accumulation of destruction/construction layered on top of each other, producing a repetitive pattern of rushing followed by waiting. As such, Nairobi, I argue, is constituted as much by unsettling as it is by sedimentation.