Foreign infrastructure, local frictions: Contested mobility and social constructs of the Nairobi Expressway

Abstract

Enduring tensions between neoliberal hegemonies and indigenous responses prevail in post-colonial African urban discourses, particularly regarding the exclusion and reclamation of indigenous, informal, or non-state transport’s access to formal infrastructure systems. This paper examines the intricate relationships between Nairobi’s matatu system—a prominent symbol of African transport and indigenous social infrastructure—and emerging Chinese-backed mega infrastructures in Kenya. It examines how the matatu system, bearing both neoliberal policies and controversial social images since its inception, interacts with the emerging formal and transnational hegemony of Chinese infrastructure investments. This paper highlights novel tensions between the indigenous matatu system and the privatized, foreign, and monopolized public infrastructure, exemplified by the Nairobi Expressway: Kenya’s first major transport Public-Private Partnership (PPP) project funded, built, and operated by a Chinese contractor. With field observations, surveys, mappings, and interviews between 2022 and 2024, this paper explores socio-economic structures and spatial implications of these transnational interactions. It reveals how Chinese contractors, mainly engineering-focused state-owned enterprises (SOEs), export their domestic experiences and visions of modern infrastructural development abroad. It highlights distinct funding structures, operational patterns, development paths, and institutional agents of Chinese infrastructure, contrasting sharply with both indigenous self-organization and neo-liberalizing formal regulation in Kenya. It also documents, analyzes, and visualizes the socio-spatial dynamics of matatu’s struggle for access to formal transport infrastructures and the socio-technical construct behind. Highlighting intersections of indigenous transport systems with emerging Chinese presence, this paper enriches accounts of decolonizing African urbanism and contributes to broader discourses on Global South urbanization and infrastructural politics. It extends traditional post-colonial discussions to South-South contexts.