Citizenship on the septic fringe: Urban social policy and peri -urban development in Kisumu, Kenya.

This dissertation presents an analysis of peri-urban settlement and urban social policy as played out in the aftermath of the Second World War in Kenya's third largest city, Kisumu. Based on over two years of ethnographic and archival research, it outlines the emergence of Manyatta, a peri-urban squatter community on the outskirts of Kisumu, by examining a series of policy interventions in urban planning and welfare. The study traces the history of three specific policy domains: local government, welfare, and housing development, to explore how shifting ideas and assumptions about urbanism and citizenship played out across national, international, and local levels. These policy interventions are analyzed from their inception in the Post War period, through the 1950's, to demonstrate points of contrast and continuity, and to highlight some of the ways they may continue to inform socio-political relations in the present. Organized around the dual ideals of city and citizen, these policies are shown to be problematic in the way they have shaped the course of urban settlement and obscured the political implications of their projected outcomes. The study interrogates both the problems and potentials of peri-urban development, and elaborates the history of Manyatta as a window on broader themes of colonial governance, state power, and policy expertise. It outlines some of the dynamics by which state actors at various levels have tended to constrain and de-politicize ideas of urban development and civic participation. The narrative points up several instances in which the ends and means of policy interventions have been conflated, and how attendant policy outcomes were experienced as directly contrary to the self-defined aims and interests of Manyatta residents. By tracing the outcomes of these policy interventions and interrogating the terms by which they were debated and implemented in Kenya, and in Manyatta in particular, the account offers a critical reflection on the logics of policy transfer, the ideas and ideologies of urbanism, and the power of development orthodoxies to determine the urban futures of post-colonial residents of peri-urban communities.Ph.D.African historyCultural anthropologySocial SciencesUrban planningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131211/2/3057890.pd