Kibera, (left) the notorious Nairobi slum that is home to an estimated 1 million souls, has figured prominently in recent news reports of the post-election ethnic chaos emerging in Kenya.I had never heard of Kibera until a few weeks before Christmas when Laurie Taylor's Radio Four programme Thinking Allowed, ran a short item on urban geographer Mike Davis's startling book Planet of Slums. It was there that I learned about the critical global acceleration of unplanned, essentially illegal urban slums like Kibera. Such places are among the most challenging environments on earth, both for those unfortunate enough to live in them and for governments and international agencies who must deal with them.
In his book, Davis points out that the un-planned nature of these improvised urban agglomerations presents specific challenges to conventional ways of imposing law and order and maintaining security. This was dramatised in Kenya earlier this week when police confronted widespread demonstrations against the government's handling of the election. Kibera was a flashpoint, with many supporters of defeated opposition leader Raila Odinga expressing their anger and frustration by burning and looting buildings within Kibera itself (Reuters report here).
After reading Mike Davis's book, I got into my Google Earth 'eyepod' and spent half an hour hovering over the corrugated roofs of Kibera, cruising its labyrinthine alleyways from 2.25km above ground (Google image above left). My fellow Google Space-Tourist John Boyle and I have been pondering the unavoidably voyeuristic aspect of this kind of technologically-assisted armchair travel. I confess to feeling an irrational sense of impending danger as I nervously set the Google controls to lower me a little closer towards the urban anomie. Instead another image appeared. The landscape became an emblem of humanity existing on the knife-edge between chaos and order.
