Contentious plots: Staking durable claims to ethnic belonging in Nairobi

How are ethnicity, citizenship, and social class articulated spatially in the postcolonial African metropolis over time? In this article, I examine the metamorphosis of the built environment as neighborhood plots of land change hands in the Parklands area of Nairobi: from old South Asian Kenyan bungalows and large family dwellings to newly built forms of apartment urbanism, underwritten by ethnic Somali developers. I propose “contentious plots” as an analytic that illuminates sedimented projects of constructing certainty through the built environment as a form of ethnic territorialization. Drawing on spatial and historical analysis, I argue that these contentious plots are conjunctural forms, where multiple histories and identities coincide and are spatialized. In the neighborhood of Parklands, zoned as “Asian” during the colonial era, such plots condense colonial and postcolonial questions of urban inclusion for older South Asian Kenyan and newer ethnic Somali residents. At the intersection of an Asian colonial-oceanic history of migration and a postcolonial-postconflict conjuncture of ethnic Somali rupture and resettlement, the Asian bungalow, the Somali apartment building, and the contentious plot on which they stand have become politicized forms. These contentious plots hence have deep social histories, revealing larger, unresolved questions of citizenship and belonging after national independence. Going beyond the Black/White binary of colonial and post-independence racial relations, therefore, I point to further axes of splintering that center Asian Kenyans and ethnic Somalis as interstitial spatial subjects of the city—and as communities at the core of accessing and producing urban space over time.