There is a particular kind of chaos that only urban planners fully appreciate. It is not the dramatic chaos of a building collapse, though Nairobi has had those too. It is the slow, grinding chaos of a city where every individual decision makes perfect economic sense and the collective outcome is a catastrophe. Welcome to Westlands.
Westlands was designed as a low-rise residential neighbourhood, a leafy address for the upper middle class, with controlled commercial activity at its edges. Today, 20-to-30-storey towers jostle for airspace above what were once single-family plots.
