Nairobi: The Visible City

A Virgilian guide leads the reader through postcolonial neighborhoods and slums of Nairobi, where skyscrapers and savannah coexist with traffic. Environmental protection defies the limits of survival, as it also happens to the city's inhabitants: waste recycling projects coincide with the recovery of the human condition of the waste pickers themselves, a recovery of dignity comparable to the attempt to restore a healthy ferinity to the now urbanized animals.

Through a journey through urban spaces, the authors unhinge the clichés of the Western imagination through visions of images and words that leave no room for do-goodism and compose a precise socio-anthropological portrait. The witnesses of this humanity are cast in the smells, tastes, colors and materials that build the city. Thanks to this materiality, one does not feel the need for far-fetched analysis, but everything is before one's eyes: it is enough to read the tales of anecdotes and events behind the birth of a commercial hub that draws development from the melting pot of heterogeneous communities that make it that "beautiful mess that will never change."



The authors go beyond the exotic fascination that may have attracted them at the beginning of their African adventure and invite us to overcome the "city safari" stereotypes typical of the Western gaze