Community-Based Land Tenure in Urban Kenya: Constructing a ‘new’ Property for the Poor?

Abstract

Informal housing remains a big challenge in cities of the global South, particularly among low-income households unable to access land and housing through the formal state and/or market mechanisms. While public resources have been expended in informal settlement upgrading projects, the sustainability of such projects often suffers from gentrification and speculation, leading eventually to market evictions of poor households. Communal land tenure has been proposed as a mechanism that can help poor households gain access and hold on to their property on a long term basis, thereby ensuring the success of settlement upgrading programmes and contributing to sustainable community development. In Kenya however, despite large portions of land remaining under communal ownership for centuries, the legal and official policy framework on land tenure has, since 1954, focused on individualized ownership as the primary mode of land management. But since the 1990s, various low-income urban communities living in informal settlements have experimented with communal landholding as a component of settlement upgrading initiatives. This paper assesses the institutional framework that has characterized the design and implementation of these forms of communal land tenure in urban Kenya. Based on empirical material from the Tanzania-Bondeni Community Land Trust in Voi and Muungano wa Kambi Moto in Nairobi, the paper highlights key social innovations that communities have devised to provide legal support for their communal land management practices and to gain concessions from urban planners and other land management …