On a chilly morning last month, Maxwell watched in horror as the home in which he was born and had lived for 24 years was bulldozed. Several armed police officers watched too, in case any of the tens of thousands of affected residents in Kibera, one of Kenya’s largest slums, tried to resist.
Maxwell was relatively lucky, as he had taken his belongings to his cousin’s house two days prior. There had been rumors that the government-led demolitions would happen, but few had taken them seriously enough to move their property. Many of his neighbors rushed against time to save whatever they could — photographs, radios, bedding — before their houses were destroyed.
As countries around the world develop, slum residents are often the victims — especially in fast-growing cities like Nairobi. In this case, the Kenyan government was making way for a four-lane highway that would ease congestion in the capital city of a country that loses over half a million dollars a day to traffic jams.
“Demolitions have happened here before. This was not the first time. Many of us live in perpetual fear of eviction,” says Maxwell, who didn’t give his surname for personal reasons.
Sometimes demolitions are inevitable in informal settlements where residents don’t have formal rights to the land. The bigger problem is that residents like Maxwell rarely receive warning, compensation, or help resettling after their homes are destroyed. None of the 10,000 to 30,000 people in Kibera who lost homes that morning have received compensation — and that inexact number is part of the reason why. If activists don’t know exactly what was destroyed, it’s nearly impossible to demand compensation, or prevent the destruction in the first place.
“It is difficult to solve a problem that is not well-defined,” says Kefa Otiso, a professor of Geography at Bowling Green State University, on the importance of getting better data about slums. “Slum maps can help to hold the government accountable by, if nothing else, conveying the number of affected structures and, more crucially, the number and identity of affected persons.”
Slum mapping is used to document everything from the number of people living in a slum to the location of schools, clinics, roads, electrical supplies, playgrounds, and toilets. “Slum mapping is useful as a tool for fighting slum demolitions, and, even more importantly, for supporting more effective urban planning,” says Otiso.
SSlums are inherently unmapped places. They’re the poor pockets of cities, mostly in the global south, where about one billion people (an eighth of the world’s population) live without access to government-supplied water, sanitation, or electricity. Because they’re essentially off the grid, it’s pretty easy for governments or private developers to ignore them — or destroy them when their existence becomes inconvenient. And residents rarely have the political or legal muscle to defend themselves.
Last month’s demolition in Kibera wasn’t unusual. In 2017 alone, 260,000 people were evicted for slum demolitions in India. In a six-month period between 2016 and 2017, 30,000 people were evicted from their homes in Lagos, Nigeria during a violent demolition that killed 11 people.
Part of why slum mapping has become popular is because it’s harder to destroy what is documented. Mapping can be high-tech, like the participatory mapping of Map Kibera, an organization based in Kibera. They use OpenStreetMap, which anyone in the world can access and edit. Mapping can also be analog; for example, Spatial Collective, another Kenyan mapping organization, often draws physical maps.
Slum mapping isn’t unique to Kenya. From Caminos de la Villa in Argentina, to Shelter Associates in India, to Slum/Informal Settlement Federation in Nigeria, mapping organizations have sprouted all over the world.
Studies show that mapping can put communities in a better position to demand their rights. One of the earliest examples took place in 1985, when two organizations in Mumbai, India — the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) and the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) — involved residents in a “people’s census.” The data gathered became a powerful statement against forced eviction and was used in court to halt the demolition of thousands of people’s homes.
Kibera itself has a history of stopping slum demolitions with mapping — even if it didn’t work last month.
In January 2004, the Kenya Railways Corporation issued a notice in daily newspapers that it would demolish all structures within 100 feet of the railway line that cuts through Kibera. With help from a local NGO, residents counted 108,000 people that would be rendered homeless by the evictions, along with 13 elementary schools, a church, and an HIV/AIDS testing clinic. A legal aid organization called Kituo Cha Sheria used these numbers in court to draft a temporary injunction.
In the meantime, several international organizations got access to these figures and began petitioning the Kenyan president, while the media publicized the plight of the communities. Through the Catholic parish in Kibera, the matter reached all the way to the Pope, who sent a personal emissary to the President. This pressure made the government cancel the notice.
WWith such a remarkable history of stopping slum demolitions, why didn’t mapping help Kibera residents this time?
Part of the reason is that unlike in 2004, this demolition was sudden, giving residents little or no time to use the information they had. “Those people said they were not going to carry out any demolitions until they had worked out how they would be resettled and compensated,” says Joshua Ogure, the project manager of Map Kibera about the government representatives who carried out the demolition. “People would have resisted, but they were caught unawares after being lied to.”
Despite Kibera’s multiple mapping initiatives, it still isn’t clear how many homes were affected by the demolitions. The government says it’s 10,000, while community leaders in Kibera say it’s closer to 30,000.
“Mapping of people is the starting point for all just [or fair] resettlement programs,” says Irũngũ Houghton, the Executive Director of Amnesty International Kenya. In this case, Map Kibera’s data shows us that, in addition to the homes, this demolition cost Kibera 11 schools, churches, and community-based organizations. And that information is power.
“Such maps can also help to galvanize slum communities to resist the demolition of their settlements,” adds Otiso, which we may have witnessed in Nairobi today.
Approximately 300 community leaders from 105 neighborhoods affected by slum demolitions marched through downtown streets to protest the demolitions in Kibera, as well as impending ones in other Nairobi slums like Deep Sea, Accra, and Ngara.
They carried signs with messages like, “Women and children are homeless, stop forced evictions” and a massive banner that displayed a timeline of all of the evictions in 2018, and the exact number of structures destroyed each time.
For Maxwell, the protests are too late. He and his siblings will live in their cousin’s house indefinitely, unsure of whether or not they will be resettled. “I cannot afford a house in most places outside Kibera, I have to find a place right here. I’m not sure when that will happen, and even if I find a new place, I can’t tell whether or not I will be evicted again,” he says.
