High-rise living in Nairobi’s Pipeline estate is stressful

Within sight of Kenya’s main international airport in Nairobi’s east, Pipeline residential estate stands out like a sore thumb. Composed almost entirely of tightly packed high-rise tenement flats, the estate has been described by the media as an urban planning nightmare. They point to its garbage problem, its waterlogged and frequently impassable streets, and the effect of dense living conditions on children’s health.

Pipeline’s transformation started roughly two decades ago. High-rise apartment blocks were a response to demand for low-cost rental housing in the rapidly urbanising capital. Individual private developers gradually converted the area, roughly 2km², into a dense, high-rise residential district. On average each block of flats hosts 200 or 300 tenants.

Pipeline is an example of how private sector developers can contribute to solving Nairobi’s housing crisis. But it’s also an example of how unregulated and poorly planned housing construction can have a negative impact on the social, economic and psychological well-being of households.

Pipeline is not the only tenement district in Nairobi. But it is one of the densest neighbourhoods in the city of over 4 million. The quality of buildings varies, but there are similarities:

rental flats mainly comprise single rooms with shared ablutions
unit design gives little attention to lighting, air circulation, or open space
tenants are forced into unfavourable rental relationships, where delays or default in payments can lead to water or electricity cuts.

The flats in Pipeline are almost exclusively inhabited by rural-urban migrants. They are attracted here by cheap accommodation and the promise of modernity. The flats have running water, tiled floors, individual electric meters and formal rental agreements.

We are researchers who study urban development, urban migration, and urban communities. Our fieldwork research sought to understand how the physical and social spaces created in neighbourhoods like Pipeline shape the experience of stress and pressure among men and women. We also looked at the strategies they apply to cope or reduce social, economic and romantic pressure.

Pipeline is a marked improvement from the options provided in Nairobi’s traditional informal settlements. Still, most basic services in the area are intermittent, or privatised. This is because the unplanned densification has outpaced the capacity of public infrastructure and services. This forces residents to pay for education, health, water, recreation and other services.

Many of these tenants are unemployed, or employed in low-wage industrial work, precarious gig work, or domestic work.

We found that men and women experience and try to cope with stress in diverse ways. Both men and women located the cause of their distress within their marital home. But the meanings and reactions to that stress diverged sharply in the migrant household.

We found that migrant men tend to experience stress in the form of pressure and migrant women in the form of tiredness.

Previous evidence points to the different ways in which stress is experienced based on biological differences between men and women. However, we propose that the tight coupling between men and pressure and between women and tiredness is the result of the expectation that men will be breadwinners. This drives men towards action and prevents women from expressing a will towards action.

Fieldwork and findings

We discovered our shared interest in studying Nairobi’s high-rise estates during a workshop on urban Nairobi.

Mario had carried out longitudinal ethnographic work with rural–urban migrants in Pipeline. His two-year-long fieldwork mostly took place in near-exclusively male spaces, such as gyms, barber shops and bars. Roughly 50 in-depth qualitative interviews revealed how men navigated urban lives that were increasingly defined by stress, pressure and exhaustion.

Miriam’s research focused on how Nairobi’s privately developed low-cost tenement precincts created environments of everyday urban dysfunction.

After the first meeting, we concluded that it would be beneficial to get a deeper understanding of women’s experiences of stress. This would help us to understand men’s and women’s experiences of stress and pressure. It would also enable us to compare how these different groups managed and coped with stress.

We designed a semi-structured questionnaire and conducted interviews with a dozen female residents. The interviewees spanned single and married women, members of a financial self-help group (chama), female neighbours who usually spent time together on balconies, a sex worker, and an entrepreneur who owned a hair salon.

Comparing the two sets of interviews provides ethnographic support for our hypothesis, which is that men and women tend to experience different types of stress: masculine “pressure” and feminine “tiredness”.

Masculine pressure is defined as an experience that provokes action. The pressure is intrinsically attached to the cause of stress and driven by the hope that overcoming it will promise social validation linked to the male provider model.

The male interviewees tended to engage in outward-oriented strategies to overcome this pressure. These include social drinking, extramarital affairs, or violent reaffirmations of gender identity. In this way, the form and design of Pipeline offered plentiful avenues for commercialised, stress-reducing activities.

In contrast, feminine tiredness emerged as an experience that inhibited action. Female respondents were constrained from aggressive responses, lest they risk being branded immoral or losing vital male financial support.

Married women, or single parents, found themselves largely confined to the small apartments. Their inward-oriented coping strategies were sometimes identified as “doing nothing” or watching TV, or performing household tasks. This passive endurance of stress was also seen as a means to “persevere” (Kiswahili: kuvumulia). In some cases, women used intermediate semi-private spaces, such as balconies, chamas or church, to connect with neighbours.

Taken together, these responses and expectations structure the modes by which male and female migrants react to or attempt to mitigate or relieve stress. This stress is not only caused by poverty but by expectations of middle-class success, ideals of romantic family life and economic progression.

Conclusions

As yet, there are no policies or programmes that seek to reverse the complex challenges created through neighbourhoods like Pipeline. Kenya’s national affordable housing programme is focused on home-ownership solutions. However, with over 90% of the city’s population renting their dwellings, and 87% renting from private individuals, Nairobi needs a better solution for rental housing.

This could be through redevelopment and area-based upgrading, expansion of basic social and community services, incentives for private developers to incrementally upgrade their housing stock, rental and tenant protection legislation, and support for sustainable, communal, and cooperative housing alternatives spearheaded by citizens themselves.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Mario Schmidt, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Miriam Maina, University of Manchester

Mario Schmidt received funding from the German Research Foundation and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He currently works for Busara, Nairobi (Kenya).

Miriam Maina undertook this research as part of her Postdoctoral research work at the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) in the University of Manchester. The ACRC is a a six-year investment by FCDO to fund new, operationally-relevant research to address intractable development challenges in African cities.