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This paper draws on research on infrastructure‐led development and urbanisation in Nairobi to explore the new urban geographies of rentier capitalism in Africa. Under the banner of Kenya's Vision 2030 national development strategy, Nairobi's agrarian hinterlands have been transformed by major road building projects. These initiatives have catalysed a peri‐urban property boom characterised by the conversion of agricultural and ranching land into urban real estate and the verticalisation of road corridors. The paper identifies four processes of land transformation driving this real estate market expansion: commodification; speculation; autoconstruction; and assetisation. Adopting a multi‐scalar conjunctural approach, it argues that rentier capitalism in this context is spatialised through the dramatic extension of real estate frontiers along the route of peri‐urban road corridors. Development along these corridors assumes a “grey” character that defies conventional formal–informal distinctions, enabling the extraction of large rentier profits and encouraging the further proliferation of frontier spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the "arduous and contingent" process of creating the "preconditions" for financialised forms of development in urban Kenya. Building on a growing critical literature on how finance is shaping development in the global South, the paper traces the more‐or‐less concerted effort of an array of actors and intermediaries to create a functioning market for urban water services. Such efforts, which are justified through appeals to a "finance gap" are an attempt to connect capital seeking profitable investment opportunities with a sector long starved of funding. The pursuit of financialised models of water provision, however, is deepening the gulf between service areas that are deemed profitable (or potentially profitable) and those that are not. The paper argues that it is not lack of money, but an emerging system of water service provision which prioritises commercial principles and value extraction, that shapes where investment does (and crucially) does not flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines the growth in mobile phone‐based lending in Kenya, where millions now borrow from services that translate digital data into credit scores. Reeling from ongoing retrenchment and marketisation, many find themselves turning to expensive, short‐term credit to "buy time". We depart from actuarial approaches to the digital economy that foreground the technical analysis of data in order to emphasise the importance of racialised expropriation and rentier capitalism. We focus on Safaricom, the corporation at the centre of the digital data and debt industry, showing how its infrastructural power and absent regulation permit it to seize value from users. Safaricom serves not only its own accumulation, but the fiscal imperatives of a Kenyan state that is, like its citizens, groaning under untenable debt. Citizens and state alike operate within the twinned constraints of illiquidity and volatility, a situation we call the "zero balance economy". By linking the popular and sovereign debt crises we explore parastatal formations of predatory inclusion—neither market nor state, but an unwieldy amalgamation of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenya is a widely cited case for proponents of fintech for development. This article shows how Kenya's fintech boom replicates patterns of uneven development inherited from the colonial era. In particular, fintech use is unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas, and heavily concentrated on Nairobi and Mombasa in particular. The article seeks to explain these patterns by situating them in relation to the spatiality and political economy of settler‐colonial agriculture, tracing successive (unsuccessful) efforts at reforming the financial system to ameliorate social and spatial disparities inherited from the colonial era. It does so drawing on recent debates about "financial infrastructures", alongside considerations of the political economy of land, property relations, and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)