Geographies of Violence and Informalization: The Case of Mathare Slums in Nairobi, Kenya

Violence has been one of the most defining features of the social experience of life in Kenyan slums and has always been described as a social evil that needs to be fixed. Using the example of Mathare slums of Nairobi, this chapter develops the argument that violence is a key component of the existential economy in slum. We locate this argument in a fairly well-developed discourse on African cities as inevitably informalized, partly because of the undue rigidity and unresponsiveness within formal institutions, and that this informalization demonstrates the limits of freedom and agency in those contexts (Osha, African Identities 5:333–334, 2007). In this chapter, we focus both on what one could term as organized violation of law and order, and on the establishment of alternative socio-economic structures and lifestyle. We have described these as geographies of violence and using data from three months of fieldwork in which we used ethnography and social survey methods, we have described and accounted for the patterns of violence in Mathare slums.