Imagine shopping arcades along Nairobi River! It can be done

One can’t deny that Nairobi is starting to look a little rough around the edges.

With each passing year “the place of cool waters” becomes drier, dirtier, and more congested.

Windswept with trash and choked with a burgeoning population, it is hard to imagine a future scenario in which Nairobi doesn’t slip deeper into a vicious cycle of urban decay.

Fortunately, an architect has forged together a plan that promises a very different future. A builder of skyscrapers, most would describe Kenyan-born architect James Archer as a big picture thinker… but this project is on another scale entirely.

“Intervention” is a blueprint to give Nairobi an extreme makeover by 2020, with the aim of making the city more beautiful, prosperous, and livable.

Perhaps the final schematic to leave the drawing board of the Oxford-trained architect, Mr Archer views Intervention as his crowning achievement — his masterpiece.

This grand project began to take shape in Mr Archer’s mind slowly, fed by idyllic memories of the past and the grim reality of the present.
“When I was a small boy living here in Nairobi I drank out of the Nairobi River,” he said. “You could certainly swim in it, you could catch fish in it, and you could watch antelope come drink from it as well.

“All those things are long since gone, and if you tried to drink from Nairobi River, you’d drop dead,” he adds with a dismayed chuckle.

The key to reviving Nairobi’s natural environment is rehabilitating the rivers which cut through the city. And besides the obvious environmental, health, and lifestyle benefits, clean rivers would be key economic corridors.

Nairobi’s rivers, everyone can see, are choked with all manner of rubbish and refuse, and often look more like dumpsites than anything else.

And while they are eyesores, they are not as profoundly polluted as rivers in Russia or the United States which have been laced with toxic industrial by-products and heavy metals.

To clean up such rivers, one needs to dig up the riverbed and clean the soil itself. Nairobi’s rivers would be a breeze to clean up by comparison, Mr Archer says, with simple garbage removal being the solution.

“By comparison, this is kid stuff,” he says. Rejuvenated rivers would pump clean, new lifeblood into the city. Riverfront properties face away from river banks, as if turning their backs on the squalor.

But Nairobians would appreciate clean rivers, Mr Archer predicts, and would before long begin facing out towards the rivers.

Mr Archer’s firm — Planning Systems Services Ltd — has been working on the plan for years, and it has been an uphill battle to get the attention and commitment of the Kenyan government for the project.

A breakthrough came in the early days of President Mwai Kibaki’s first term. Planning Systems was invited to State House to give a presentation about low income housing, and Mr Archer cleverly tucked some Intervention materials under his arm before entering the meeting.

After a short, successful meeting Mr Archer asked the President if he would take a look at the Intervention scheme. President Kibaki quickly became enraptured in the grand ideas and lost track of time, studying the blueprints.

“About halfway through he said, ‘I’ve missed my lunch,’” the architect recalls. “Two hours later he walked us to the front door.” The vision Intervention layout has slowly seeped into Vision 2030.

“It’s because of Intervention that the Nairobi River basin is recognised as one of the key economic corridors for development within vision 2030,” Mr Archer says.

A question still remains: Whether the Kenyan government is willing and able to complete the gargantuan projects. Fortunately, the United Nations Environment Programme is a keen supporter of the Intervention project and will provide needed support.

At 74, Mr Archer moves a little slower than he used to. Nevertheless, he plans to keep on working until his masterpiece is realised. “I shall be very happy to sit back and support the whiskey industry after I’ve finished with this,” he says with a chuckle.

As it stands now, the section of the Nairobi River lying between the Globe and Racecourse roundabouts is not much to look at. Asphyxiated with trash, the dirty river seems at times barely to flow at all.

Nevertheless, Nairobi’s famous itinerant Maasai Market takes place once a week along the banks of the river in the ample space lying between Kijabe Street to the south and Kipande Road to the north.

As it stands, the National Museum — a must-see for tourists visiting Kenya — is isolated from the downtown core by this underused downtown park. To get there, one has to go through the chaotic and congested Globe roundabout.

Within 10 years, this place will be unrecognisable. The government has already given some Sh5 million to Planning Systems to clean and landscape the river, and work is set to begin within months.

The river will be widened and deepened significantly, and a system of locks will be built to trap water in the area and control its flows with hand operated sluices.

“When approaching the end of the dry season, and you know water is coming, you lower the water levels so that when flash floods arrive, you close the sluices and the water levels rise,” Mr Archer says. “So in one stroke, you have resolved the disaster downstream of flash floods which cause thousands of deaths each year.”

To provide a lush, clean environment, Mr Archer plans to seed the area with beneficial plants and wildlife. His firm has successfully used this approach in lakes at the Lakeview Estate and the Windsor Golf Club.

“There are many reeds, sedges, and sages which actually clean the water, and we will landscape the entire waterfront with those,” he said. “We will also stock the river with fish.”

First to go in the pond are Gambusia, or Mosquitofish, to control malaria-bearing pests. Next are a few female Nile perch to eat another pest; frogs. Finally, tilapia will be introduced into the ponds, which will be fished on licence.

The locks — a planned half a dozen — will also double as pedestrian bridges connecting the two banks of the river. This will bring Museum Hill much closer for tourists and provide a scenic shortcut for residents.

First to be built along the banks of the river are large arcades that will become the hub of the city’s informal trading sector. “Hawkers have no place to trade because there are not enough markets in the city,” he said. “Now they’re squatters in the city.”

The arcades will be large, breezy open air buildings with plenty of natural light. Stalls at the landmark new buildings will be just marginally more expensive than space at Gikomba Market, Mr Archer says, but will offer a far superior ambience.

The most immediate beneficiaries will be the artisans and retailers at the Maasai Market, who will operate in a much more tourist friendly environment.

“Once this kicks off, it’s going to change the face of Ngara and Kijabe Street,” Mr Archer says. “It’s going to create a new focus around that area, and we expect that a lot of these areas will be regenerated.”

Kijabe Street is a “dead street” at present, but will not remain so for long. “Property values will skyrocket,” he predicts. “It will be the place people will want to be.”

While this project has been on the drawing board for some time, Mr Archer predicts that 2011 will be a turnaround year. After all, he has received orders from permanent secretaries to have something on the ground this year.

After the Kipande Road pilot phase is complete, Mr Archer would like to see similar property developments all the way along the remaining 21 kilometres of the Nairobi River waterfront.

“My ambition is to see the Nairobi marathon not run through these horrible streets, but down the footpath along the river,” he says.