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November 20, 2007
November
The besetting sin of planners is that when they plan something, they want and expect it to stay as planned and built. They seem to think that things which are completed ought properly to that way; whereas, we should recognize that everything is going to change and try to think how it can change for the better, rather than the worse.
Jane Jacobs in an interview with the World Bank.
The foreigners and the KCs (Kenya Colonials/Cowboys) residing in Nairobi live a 5 days urban or gated community / 2 days rural life. The only time spent in Nairobi seems to be for work and the weekends for golfing or game drives out in the national parks. Although Nairobi still has a strong culture of maximising its outdoor public space, it seems that the rising middle class (ruomours say that there are over 60 000 new cars on the roads of Kenya every month) together with the international professionals are opting for gated malls and gated communities.
The UN has for example a security evaluation for Nairobi in where they assess where its professionals and families are recommended to live in. One of the evaluation criteria is the proximity of a shopping mall.
With a rising informal settlement and the formal part either wanting to be introvert and/or rural the planners of the city will have an impossible task to hold on to its opportunities of being the hub of East Africa with positive spatial, social and economical diversity.
Having said that, for the last two weekends I have been out from the city climbing Mt. Longonot and checking out the waterfalls in Thika with friends.
Posted by hans at 07:26 AM | Comments (2)