Can a chaotic city spawn orderly ‘satellites’? We went to Kenya to find out.
It’s hard to give big cities a reset, even when they appear to need one. What about a fresh slate – a new urban center, not a suburb – just outside city limits? Our writer traveled to two of Nairobi’s new offshoots. She joins our podcast to talk about the assignment.
They’re features of most of the world’s cities: vibrancy and diversity, traffic and crime, efficiency and dysfunction. What if the best of those were enhanced, and the worst of them got resolved – or at least eased?
Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, is bursting at the seams, many of its services overmatched by demand. So it’s building out, not into bland suburban sprawl but into carefully designed satellite cities. Funding sources vary. So do success rates. This approach works for many residents, says Monitor writer Erika Page, who interviewed people in two new Nairobi-adjacent cities.
As many here point out, a main purpose of these cities is to draw heavy international investment and create jobs. Critics wonder if money might have been better spent improving Nairobi itself. But residents see progress.
“[I]t’s … reasonable for people to want to live somewhere pleasant, somewhere safe,” says Erika. “And also just something as basic as the air is fresh, there’s greenery around, and you can actually breathe.”
“It can feel like we’re so wired to look for what isn’t working, that our eyes sometimes gloss over when things are going right,” Erika says, “or ... at least when people are trying interesting things out to get toward what is right.”
Episode transcript
Clay Collins: In this world, there are places and things that work really well, places and things that are utterly dysfunctional, and lots and lots of stages in between. Like every good reporter, the Monitor’s Erika Page covers that whole spectrum, but she does tend to gravitate. Last time she was on this podcast talking about Mondragon, Spain, in the Basque region, Erika said this:
Erika Page: I do tend to be drawn to stories that show what happens when a group of people are willing to think a little differently from the status quo. And then when people think differently, new ways of doing things emerge.
Collins: Erika recently notched a great double dateline: Tatu City and Konza Technopolis, Kenya.
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Collins: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Erika joins me today to talk about her story. Welcome back, Erika.
Page: Thank you, Clay.
Collins: So anyone who’s been to Nairobi knows that it’s a fascinating city, but chaotic, beset – like so many cities around the world – by some old infrastructure problems, some bureaucratic ones.
Tell us about this tale of two satellite cities and about the problems that they’re trying to solve.
Page: So the big problem in places like Nairobi is that these megacities were never meant to hold the number of people who are living there now. And so you have these huge waves of people that have left the countryside looking for work. And like you say, you end up with these really overcrowded cities where basic infrastructure, like water power, garbage services are pretty poor. Nairobi is teeming with energy and possibility, but it’s also, it’s loud and it’s polluted, and often not very safe. You can get stuck in traffic for hours on end. So the idea with satellite cities is that they’re a way to essentially start over, and they can be sold as these high tech, super green, futuristic utopias. But in their most basic form, they offer those who can afford to live there, which is not most people, a clean, orderly lifestyle where things actually work as you would hope.
So when you go to Tatu City, which is one of the places I visited outside of Nairobi, being built by a private developer, Rendeavor, it’s kind of like stepping into a totally different Kenya. You have these wide, quiet, paved streets and cookie-cutter apartment complexes. And when I went, I was traveling with a driver, and we were handed this little card with the rules for Tatu City, where they advertise: “You’ve arrived at the safest city in Africa.” And the card says things like “no littering,” “no driving over 25 miles per hour,” “stop at every stop sign.” And of course, we listened attentively and we nodded. And then a few intersections down once we were already in, we were pulled over and apparently we had not stopped for the full four seconds that you have to stop at one of the stop signs, and we were asked to pay a fine of 1,000 shillings, which is something like $8. And the driver, who’s Kenyan, was flabbergasted and spent 10 minutes trying to talk his way out of it, but the traffic enforcer wouldn’t budge, and that’s the kind of thing that would never happen in the city of Nairobi where rules often go unenforced.
Collins: That’s interesting.
Page: And so that’s a big part of the appeal of these sorts of cities. It’s part of the reason why businesses are more willing to open up shop here.
Collins: Right. You just talked about Tatu City, there’s also Konza Technopolis. So why are there two satellite cities outside of Nairobi, and how are they different?
Page: Yeah, there are actually a few. Tatu City and Konza Technopolis are probably the best known of the satellite cities in Nairobi, which are also sometimes called charter cities. Tatu is a bit closer to the city itself, and it’s a totally private project by this developer that’s working on building seven of these sorts of cities across the continent in different countries. But Konza Technopolis is a government project that has been in the works for almost two decades. And it’s framed as this sustainable technology hub for Kenya’s grand ambitions of having something akin to its own Silicon Valley, which in Kenya they call the Silicon Savannah. So it’s much loftier in vision.
But it also of course depends on government funding, which can depend on political whims. And so not that much progress has actually been made on the ground, and when you go there, Konza feels a little bit more like a ghost town. Some of the roads have been laid down. And they made sure to tell me a lot of the underground infrastructure is in place. Um, there’s a new university being built, but no one is living there yet. And some of the investors I spoke to are getting a little bit nervous about the delays and whether the government is actually going to be able to deliver on its promises.
Tatu meanwhile is intentionally pragmatic about the whole development process, and so they’re only building out what they know there’s market demand for. So the process is a little bit more piecemeal, but maybe more reliable for investors. And then of course there are concerns about what that means for a private company to run a city. What happens to the democratic process, to transparency? All of those questions.
Collins: Wow. So different backers, slightly different purposes, and slightly different results in the two places. There’s a quote in your piece with regard to one of them: “We want to have a small Europe here.” Is that based solely or partly on the perception of Europe as being the gold standard in terms of quality of life and urban infrastructure, or is there more to it than that?
Page: I think that’s a big part of it. And there were a few people who said things along that line. One woman who moved to Tatu City after she retired said that a childhood friend had come to visit, and just stood there, looking around her, gaping and said: “It feels like I’m in London.” And so there’s this romanticization, I think, of life in Europe or the United States. You know, these picture perfect scenes that everybody sees on TV or in movies. And you can call that elitist. And of course, often only the upper echelons of society actually get to live in these places. But it’s also reasonable for people to want to live somewhere pleasant, somewhere safe where you don’t have to worry about being robbed on the street. That’s another thing people mentioned a lot when I was walking around talking to people. And also just something as basic as the air is fresh, there’s greenery around, and you can actually breathe. People describe their heart rates slowing when they arrived.
Collins: You’ve touched on the equity issue a couple of times. Um, when things get a lot better for some subset of a community, they sometimes get worse for others, or at the very least, some people get left behind. Obviously there are people who can’t, as you suggest, afford to leave Nairobi. In what ways and to what degree are these satellite cities you wrote about factoring in a sense of equity, or not doing so?
Page: I don’t think equity is at the forefront of anyone’s minds here. Tatu City prides itself on offering housing for the middle class. Its cheapest condos sell at around $45,000. But that’s still way out of reach for most Kenyans. And I mean, ultimately Rendeavor is a commercial developer and they chose the African market for its huge potential return on investment because there’s so much growth possibility in Africa. And so a lot of the housing that’s offered there is luxury housing for the very elite, and the call-center worker who I interviewed, who works for CCI Global, which is one of the companies that’s operating in Tatu City, said that only a handful of the top managers out of a thousand some workers could actually afford to live in the city itself.
The other argument you come across is that the primary purpose of these sorts of places is to attract this big international investment that can actually create local jobs. So you’re benefiting the wider economy in a more indirect way. Um, but you also hear people say that these resources being spent on these new cities could be, in a hypothetical world, spent on improving the city that already exists and does need major infrastructure improvements.
Collins: It’s interesting how universal and persistent the issue of people not being able to afford to live in the city where they work is, or having to face traffic to get to and from. I mean, as you were talking about that, I was thinking about the city of Boston.
So you have found stories of success of one kind or another. And it’s usually caveated success, because success usually is. But you found these stories in Uruguay, in Sweden, in Spain where you’re based. Um, when I saw a story recently about a laminated wood-built climate-friendly mini city springing up in Sweden, I sent it to you because, you know, it had Erika Page written all over it.
You recently wrote about whether AI – which is not a place, of course, but a major focus – could be democratized, which is an interesting and refreshing take. What would you say these success stories have in common and how do you go about finding them?
Page: Yeah, I think these types of stories are happening all around us, but we don’t always consider them news. It can feel like we’re so wired to look for what isn’t working, that our eyes sometimes gloss over when things are going right, or maybe more realistically, at least when people are trying interesting things out to get toward what is right. And that sort of thing goes against this collective narrative that we have at the moment, which is that everything we know and love is either crumbling or it could be about to crumble. Um, so for me it’s more about: Can I keep my eyes open for all the ways people are choosing not to buy that overarching narrative at face value, and are choosing instead to take these little imperfect steps forward.
Collins: Build on wins.
Page: Right.
Collins: Well, thank you, Erika, for the stories you bring home to readers, and for always being such a great guest. I hope you get to go to that wooden Swedish city.
Page: Thank you so much, Clay. I hope so too.
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Collins: To our listeners, thanks for listening. You can find show notes with links to the stories we just discussed, and to all of Erika’s work, including her past appearances on this show, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. We recently shifted production from weekly to something more ad hoc. If there are Monitor stories you’d like to hear talked about, please let me know at collinsc@csmonitor.com. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Jeff Turton and Alyssa Britton. Our original music is by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2025.
