The purpose of this article is to analyze the 100-year transformation of Mathare Valley settlement in Nairobi City County of Kenya. It answers the question of how the unwanted settlement has found a space for its residents against policy and fiscal odds to survive and provide housing for last one century to an urban poor who were otherwise considered vagrants by municipal authorities. Mathare Valley settlement is a shanty attributable to reliance on the use of readily available and cheap materials such as corrugated iron sheet, carton boards, cast-off timber and plastic sheeting for putting up the structures. The questions of economic rent and ‘who would meet the cost of municipal services’ rendered to the city in ‘unauthorized’ Mathare settlement dominated municipal and city council debates up to the 1950s and a legacy held by contemporary political elite. Mathare is a reflection of the resilience of the lumpen in the context of an unwelcome urbanization policy framework relegating it to unauthorized, informality, filth, disease, vagrancy and crime. Notwithstanding these challenges today Mathare is home to 60 % of Nairobians.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the 100-year transformation of Mathare Valley settlement in Nairobi City County of Kenya. It answers the question of how the unwanted settlement has found a space for its residents against policy and fiscal odds to survive and provide housing for last one century to an urban poor who were otherwise considered vagrants by municipal authorities. Mathare Valley settlement is a shanty attributable to reliance on the use of readily available and cheap materials such as corrugated iron sheet, carton boards, cast-off timber and plastic sheeting for putting up the structures. The questions of economic rent and ‘who would meet the cost of municipal services’ rendered to the city in ‘unauthorized’ Mathare settlement dominated municipal and city council debates up to the 1950s and a legacy held by contemporary political elite. Mathare is a reflection of the resilience of the lumpen in the context of an unwelcome urbanization policy framework relegating it to unauthorized, informality, filth, disease, vagrancy and crime. Notwithstanding these challenges today Mathare is home to 60 % of Nairobians.