Recently, the whole country was startled by unrestrained indulgence where six lions were killed in Kitengela. This act should be condemned in the strongest terms possible.
However, as this happens, the long term perspective of the issue shouldnot be closed to our eyes.
Demographic and social changes place more people in direct contact with wildlife. As human populations grow, settlements expand into and around protected areas.
In Kenya, many areas with abundant wildlife, such as Samburu, Trans-Mara, Taita and Kwale, conflict is intensified by land use fragmentation and the development of small-scale farming. In fact, state and trust ranches have been subdivided and sold as small holdings and cultivated with commercial horticultural crops. This is the case in Kajiado and Kitengela with flower and vegetable growing.
The Nairobi National Park on the southern edge is left porous to allow unrestricted entry and exit of animals into the park to and from the southlands towards the edges and slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro around the Amboseli.
Unfortunately, due to increasing human encroachment, large herds of animals previously sighted on plains grazing, hunting and roaming to and from Nairobi plains are no longer visible.
We need to realize that we have finite resources in terms of the land that we can expand into. Nairobi does not have to grow all the way to Kitengela, Rongai or Ngong as it has.
The results of this sprawl are evident. The pains not only include agonizing travel time to work, but also severe human wildlife conflict at the edges of the Nairobi National Park.
People have encroached where animals used to wander and range freely. It need not be seen as though it is lions encroaching peoples homes! Houses have been built where lions used to freely range and hunt.
Our city planned on the basis of all radiating to a central place should be blamed for this. All are supposed to converge to the centre with everyone working in the middle with peoples sleeping quarters and zones left on the outside.
In other words, this poor planning has contributed largely to heavy building far away from the CBD thus huge uptake of public transport to the centre for work.
The City Planning department has most of the blame to take for failing to guide a remedial mixed use scenario.
A mixed use city is a scenario where people live near their places of work, ideally within a 500 metres radius from their homes. In such a city, transport is cheaper because you can move relatively larger numbers of people fairly quickly and over a short distance to their places of interest.
This way, people would live very close to their main places of work, e.g the CBD, Westlands, Upper Hill, Ngong’ road or the Industrial Area. People around these places would be accommodated mainly in high living towers leaving the ground free for communal facilities and playing fields.
If city planning were done to deliberately encourage people to live next to their place of work as in a mixed-use scenario, then without doubt, many of the problems now faced would be reduced.
Considering the actual population growth rate of humans, increasing demand for natural resources and the growing pressure for access to land, it is clear that the human wildlife conflict will not be eradicated in the near future, however it needs all to be managed.
The author is an architect working for Kenya Wildlife Services
What you refer to here as urban sprawl in Nairobi isn’t urban sprawl per se. Nairobi, compared to other cities in Africa and even the world is uber compact. Really. In fact, this compaction is even greater in the townships you have listed as evidence of urban sprawl (Ngong’, Athi River, Kitengela, Rongai, etc) compared to the area bound within the traditional City of Nairobi boundaries. Very little public or private space is left as urbanism spreads into those townships and the population living within those townships is relatively large and growing even larger. Haven’t you noticed the traffic jams in those townships every evening (including weekends) as the denser concentration of the population exerts its transportation requirements? Have you noticed that these same townships are served by a thriving public transit (matatu) system that could not be possible with lower densities? Even within East Africa Nairobi is super compact. Dar es salaam, for instance, spreads for 60 kilometres into its hinterland. Cape Town spreads into its hinterland for approximately 120 kilometres. And those are not even close to the scale of sprawl of cities in the US; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, or elsewhere; Beijing, Dehli, Cairo, Johannesburg. The question here is purely one of human-wildlife conflict and the issue at the heart of the problem is urban primacy.