NEGATIVE ASSETS : Settler Colonialism, Speculative Urbanism, and the Moral Economy of Smallholding on Nairobi's Real Estate Frontier

Abstract The expansion of Nairobi's real estate frontier into its peri‐urban hinterlands creates new opportunities and new dilemmas for smallholder families whose land is skyrocketing in value. Instead of taking the opportunity to become urban rentiers, many smallholders across Nairobi's peripheries are selling their inherited ‘ancestral’ plots in spite of strident taboos about the dangers of alienating patrimonial property. To explain why this is the case, we demonstrate how settler colonial histories of land reform created a demographic of smallholders that possessed land as a ‘negative asset’, never viable for long‐term commercial farming, and to which they became precariously rooted. While land's status as a commodity has been resisted despite titling, its rising value suggests that the commodification process is approaching thorough completion, with meagre plots sold rather than retained. Drawing on ethnographic cases of land sale, the article argues that the combination of settler colonial histories of land reform and the arrival of the real estate frontier works together to erode the moral economy of smallholding, forcing ‘ancestral’ land onto the market.