Affective Infrastructures: the Urbanization of Imagination in Nairobi,Citizenship, Infrastructure and the Postcolonial

When Michel Serres asked: ‘What is closed? What is open? What is a connective path? What is a tear? What are the continuous and discontinuous? What is a threshold, a limit?’ (Serres 1995: 44), he could have been referring to the connective spatialities of infrastructure, which Bélanger (2009), amongst others, suggests needs to be radically rethought as ‘open systems of live media operating across different geographical, politic, and temporal scales’. In this paper I draw upon these perspectives in a reading of the post-colonial condition in contemporary Nairobi, with a focus on the political and cultural politics of roads, streets and contested dramas of everyday mobility. The paper sets the scene against the backdrop of continuous urban development, which has witnessed extensive dispossession and displacement of the poor. The work is based upon found ethnography and the divergent realities of the post-colonial city as represented in political discourse and in contemporary art, literature and music (including Dennis Muraguri, Paul Onditi, Kalamashaka, Yvonne Owuor and Billy Kahora). Theorizing the entanglements of representation and materiality, by chasing their effervescence, disturbance, agitation, diversity, and unevenness, the paper engages in loose domain switching, to identify the productions of diverse publics, who live in and in expectation of infrastructural change. The paper proposes that the manner in which these publics have experienced, embodied and represented these developments reveals complex infrastructural states, which speak to tensions at the intersection of the body, place and technology shaped in the orbit of ever evolving post-colonial settlements in which the question of rights to the city, citizenship and precarity loom large.