Saving the past, building the future: Nairobi’s need to celebrate its architectural heritage – Aref Adamali

Nairobi is a fast-growing city, with many of the city’s neighborhoods enjoying an unprecedented property boom. With this growth comes destruction – old residential bungalows get replaced with apartment blocks, two to three storey shops with office buildings.

The pace and scale of development means that Nairobi is losing many of its older buildings fast, some of which are historically and architecturally noteworthy. In these instances, Nairobi is losing the structural representations of its history and the different cultures that have shaped the city, one of the most cosmopolitan in Africa. Once lost, this heritage cannot be regained.

Preserving Nairobi’s architectural and cultural history has to begin with recognizing this history. This requires identifying noteworthy buildings in Nairobi and developing a list of them.

This kind of process is not new: a list of buildings of historical and architectural merit for Nairobi exists, which includes wonderful old buildings such as McMillan Library and Khoja Mosque. The majority of the buildings on this list were built between the 1910s to 1940s; many are institutional buildings in or around the city center.

However, it is in its residential areas that much Nairobi’s growth is happening. In advanced economies, the residential property market is estimated to be worth $52 trillion, compared to a $28 trillion-sized commercial market. Kenya does not seem to diverge considerably from this trend of the dominance of residential property investment.

Furthermore, most of the city’s buildings have been constructed after independence, so the bulk of the city’s architectural past is embodied in relatively new structures.

All of this means that in a new city like Nairobi, its architectural heritage lies in less obvious places: in its residential neighborhoods and in the relatively recent past. Seeking out and recognizing these small or unobvious ‘gems’ is the next step of a listing process that Nairobi should embark on.

This type of listing process will not likely lead to any immediate or obvious financial gain for the buildings’ owners. There are limited public resources available to preserve buildings purely for the sake of their architectural merit. However, neither should it come with any formal restrictions, as is the case with some listing programs – legal restrictions will likely be met with strong resistance.

The listing process proposed would merely recognize the fact that a building’s owner posses a noteworthy building. Such recognition will carry with it an implicit request that the building’s owner do what they can to preserve it, making the owners unofficial custodians of Nairobi’s architectural heritage.

This kind of wider and deeper listing process would therefore be more about celebration, not regulation.

Aside from conserving the past, recognizing and celebrating the best of Nairobi’s architecture will ideally also raise the profile of good architecture and quality construction today.

Good buildings improve a neighborhood and give pleasure to a wider public than just their occupants. Together, they shape the feel of a city and help to create its identity. This is the case for all kinds of buildings, from the grand, like New York’s Chrysler Building, to the more modest, such as the family homes that line Amsterdam’s canals.

However, all of these buildings share something in common: their builders strove to create something that would extend beyond themselves and their own generation, at times ostentatiously, at other times quietly. But all of them wanted to build something that was in its way remarkable.

This kind of mentality is not unique to New York or Amsterdam. Builders and designers in Nairobi have also shared these traits. We need to now go into our neighborhoods and scan our commercial streets to locate the products of their efforts, to celebrate good buildings and their creators, and draw on them as inspiration to do similar: to create a Nairobi today that will be a source of pride and pleasure for the generations of tomorrow.