New city-making in Africa: a case of planning hybridity

Mwau, Charles

New city-making in Africa: a case of planning hybridity

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment

Abstract

The recent trend of building new cities in Africa has been viewed with scepticism, particularly due to its emphasis on privatisation and its potential to exacerbate existing urban challenges. However, the role of the African state in these privatised urban developments is not well understood, despite the active involvement of public sector agencies in local planning interventions. Consequently, this research explores how the state and the private sector engage in the production of new city making; what types of planning interventions are used in this production; and how these forms of production change (if at all) our taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of public sector planning in Africa. The research is guided by a three-pronged main research question and four subsidiary questions. The main question asks: How does the state and the private sector engage in the production of new city-making in Nairobi? What types of planning interventions are used in this form of production? And how do these forms of production change taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of public sector planning in Africa? The case study is Tatu City, which is located in the wider Nairobi metropolitan region. Tatu City was, and remains, a pioneer of Kenya's private sector-led ‘new city-making.' The case study research method uses a qualitative strategy of inquiry encompassing discourse analysis and a critical realist ontological lens. Overall, the research is underpinned by poststructural and postcolonial standpoints that include theories on governance. Data were collected from 42 key informants in combination with techniques of documentary analysis (primary and secondary documents) and field observations. The interviews were conducted between 2020 and 2023, involving a range of actors: both state and non-state actors (national state and local state agencies, private developers and investors, built environment practitioners, academics, real estate brokers, and local area leaders) and residents. Documentary analysis and observations were undertaken throughout the study period. Findings reveal that the ‘blurriness' in public-private sector roles and functions constitutes an active field of power where ‘hybrid' institutions and hybridisation practices emerge, resulting in hybridity. This hybridity, which is linked to discourses of spatial order and economic growth, defines how urban space is produced and reproduced in contemporary Kenya. Moreover, multiple converging and conflicting rationalities of diverse actors are embedded in hybridisation practices. By paying attention to these hybridisation practices and processes, a situated perspective of knowledge production is revealed, notably a Southern perspective. This perspective—which I conceptualise as Planning Hybridity—assists us not only in deepening our understanding of contemporary new city-making in Africa, but also of everyday practices of urban reproduction (as actually existing urbanisms). I thus propose Planning Hybridity as an analytical and explanatory theory to understand how the interplay between public and private sector relations is crucial to the development of Africa's new city-making, which materialises alongside the reproduction of actually existing urbanisms.