Nairobi: Markets without Walls

This paper examines the politics of informal street vending in Nairobi, Kenya, exploring the tensions between neoliberal urban governance and the survival economies of the urban poor. Drawing on Nairobi's street markets as a case study, it argues that the city's regulatory drive to confine trade within designated market spaces reflects a broader vision of urban modernity that prioritises foreign investment and sanitised public space over the livelihood needs of low-income vendors. Situating its analysis within Kenya's Vision 2030 development framework, the paper demonstrates how aspirational urban planning functions as a technology of exclusion, displacing informal traders through police harassment, arbitrary taxation, and punitive enforcement.
Engaging with debates in critical urbanism around the right to the city and the contested nature of African urban public space, the paper challenges developmentalist framings that treat street vending as a problem to be managed rather than a legitimate form of urban economic life. It further draws attention to the undertheorised question of urban food security in sub-Saharan Africa, arguing that the erosion of street-based food markets carries profound implications for how the urban poor access affordable nutrition — a dimension largely neglected in policy frameworks that remain oriented toward rural food systems. Informed by African urbanism scholarship that insists on reading African cities on their own terms rather than as failed approximations of a Western urban ideal, the paper positions Nairobi's informal markets not as symptoms of underdevelopment but as dynamic spaces of economic and social reproduction. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of work that foregrounds the everyday struggles of African urban dwellers against the exclusionary logics of contemporary city-making, and calls for planning approaches that recognise informality as a structural feature of African urban life rather than a transitional aberration.