CUSAS Seminar with Dr. Elisa Tamburo (Harvard University and University of Oxford)

 

CUSAS Seminar with Dr. Elisa Tamburo (Harvard University and University of Oxford)Contested Sovereignty: Planners, residents and Chinese-led urban development in Nairobi, Kenya

 

This paper examines Nairobi’s contemporary processes of city-making to show how sovereignty is negotiated beyond the bounds of the Kenyan nation-state. Since the early 2000s, the rise of Chinese private construction firms in Nairobi has significantly reshaped how the city is planned, built, and inhabited. Chinese-led urban development not only fragments the perspectives and social positioning of the Kenyan urban middle class, but also exposes divergent—and at times conflicting—interests among Chinese actors themselves. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Nairobi, I analyse the effects of private Chinese financial engagement in the city, asking which contested visions of urban futures emerge. By carefully distinguishing among different stakeholders—builders, residents, and municipal authorities—I argue for moving beyond nation-centred analyses of sovereignty. Focusing on the scale of the city opens new vantage points on the broader forces that shape Nairobi’s future and reveals how these visions frequently diverge from those that urban dwellers imagine and aspire to.

Bio:

Elisa Tamburo is a social anthropologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow, jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard and the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford. Her current research project, “Negotiating the City,” explores urban planning and everyday dwelling in Nairobi, Kenya, amid the rapid expansion of China-built urban infrastructure. Her work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as the JRAI, Focaal, and the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs. Elisa is currently revising her first book manuscript, Exiled in the City, for Cornell University Press. Before her Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, she was a Research Associate in Social Anthropology on the ERC project “Cosmological Visionaries” at King’s College London. She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London, in 2019.