The information infrastructure of urbanisation: Mobilising ‘New generation’ allotment letters in Nairobi's metropolitan peripheries

In Kenya, a key strategy to address the challenges of urbanisation has been the state's push to modernise its land records by creating digital Land Information Management Systems (LIMS). In this paper, we use the lens of ‘information infrastructures’ to understand how allotment letters are entangled with the digitalising state's desire for formalising land tenure and managing Kenyan urbanisation. By examining the political-technological-material emergence of new generation allotment letters, we argue that these documentary artefacts are the smallest nodes in a vast information infrastructure of urbanisation that is simultaneously physical and digital, spatial and non-spatial, paper and hybrid, human and non-human, linked and fragmented. Based on in-depth interviews with county officials and field observations of land validation exercises in rapidly urbanising peripheries of Nairobi, we examine how the exercise claimed to establish accuracy of land records through new generation allotment letters, reflecting a deliberate techno-optimism of legal tenure. These documentary artefacts aimed to fix land to legal classification systems, and erased all other diverse claims to land, thus reinforcing historical gender and class inequalities. This paper finds that despite claims of land validation as a technical process, state officials are forced to acknowledge the contested nature of allotment letters and therefore open up to broader stakeholder participation, boundary negotiations and an alternative dispute resolution process. It concludes that information infrastructures of urbanisation are not solely technical systems but tools of urban governance: shaping access, control, and classification, they reinforce power and land injustices, affecting how urbanisation is measured and acknowledged.