One blazing hot day in early 2014, I was walking through Kaloleni, a rundown housing estate in the Eastlands area of Nairobi, Kenya's bustling capital city. Kaloleni was designed in the 1940s by British colonial authorities. It was planned as a model urban neighbourhood for African families but is now notable more for its dilapidation and decaying infrastructure than for its promise of a new kind of urban future. Terracotta tiled roofs are patched with tarpaulin, roads are more pothole than asphalt, and rubbish is piled up on the verges. Rounding a corner behind a row of ramshackle stone bungalows, I came across two men hard at work, sawing and hammering. A gleaming stack of new corrugated iron glinted in the sunlight, its silvered brightness contrasting sharply with the shabby textures of the houses. A square frame of wooden poles had already been assembled, and they were engaged in attaching the frame to the side of one of the houses. I recognised one of the men and stopped to chat. I asked what they were up to, expecting them to say they were building a storeroom or an ad hoc extension to the old house. Daniel stopped hammering and stood up. Squinting in the sunlight, he grinned broadly. ‘This? What you see here, this is Vision 2030!’ he said. We have waited so long for investment in this place, he continued, but still it has not come. He explained how his house is overcrowded and his children have to sleep on the floor. That is why there is so much building work happening in Kaloleni: ‘Now us people here cannot wait any longer. We are making our own urban renewal’.

Nairobi is seemingly on the cusp of dramatic urban change. As in many other countries across Africa, the Kenyan government has launched a series of infrastructure-led megaprojects under the umbrella of ‘Vision 2030’, a development blueprint for the future of the country. Nested within this larger vision is ‘Nairobi Metro 2030’, an urban plan that promises to reinvent Nairobi as a ‘world class African metropolis’; a spectacular new node in a network of global cities (Government of Kenya 2008).