Nairobi’s urban growth has exposed cracks in its planning system, with architect Arthur Adeya urging sweeping reforms to make the city safer and more livable.
He proposed new approaches to zoning, separating planning from building oversight, and appointing a city architect to focus on the city’s aesthetics and functionality. Adeya warned that zoning should serve as a tool for equitable land management rather than reinforce historical segregation.
In a Thursday interview with Radio Generation, Adeya said Nairobi’s current planning framework is outdated and disconnected from the realities of modern construction. “We have gotten to the point where our construction has gotten so sophisticated, the densities have grown. We need to separate planning from building and actually create a Department of Building,” he said.
He emphasized that once planning approvals are granted, monitoring and enforcement should fall under a separate department to guarantee compliance with design standards.
The city architect, he added, would oversee urban design quality, ensuring that public spaces and buildings contribute positively to residents’ experience. “At the end of the day, people engage with what they see and what they experience, and sometimes planning becomes too abstract,” Adeya noted.
Adeya described zoning as a framework for managing land use within communities, ensuring that development serves collective needs. “Zoning is really the appropriation of a certain use or a performance for a parcel of land so that it can work and be controlled within a greater community. I would look at it as a way of sharing the land,” he said.
Under Governor Johnson Sakaja, Nairobi has been experimenting with new zoning reforms to allow taller buildings and reorganize land use patterns. The 2024 proposal permitted up to 75 floors in select commercial zones while increasing height limits in residential neighborhoods like Kilimani, Kileleshwa, and Lavington.
Low-density areas including Karen, Runda, Nyari, and Muthaiga remain single-dwelling zones, while mid-rise developments are permitted along major corridors and riverfronts.
The reforms respond to the city’s inability to expand horizontally and the pressure to accommodate rising population numbers. However, safety concerns loom large. In 2026, experts reported that about 85% of Nairobi’s buildings fail to meet structural safety standards, leaving only 15% safe for occupation due to poor regulation, corruption, and weak enforcement.
Following the South C building collapse, a survey covering roughly 15,000 structures revealed that only around 2,250 buildings were considered structurally sound, while approximately 12,750 required major repairs or posed safety risks.
Professional bodies, including the Institution of Engineers of Kenya and the Architectural Association of Kenya, flagged the high rate of unsafe buildings as a systemic failure in oversight, design, and enforcement.
Adeya cautioned that even minor ground movements or tremors could trigger collapses in vulnerable structures, underscoring the need for stricter inspections and accountability for developers who flout regulations.
He also called for modernizing zoning practices beyond the traditional separation of land uses. Form-based zoning, Adeya said, could control building height, setbacks, sunlight access, and environmental performance rather than strictly dictate land purpose.
“We are not going to direct what you do on that piece of land. We are going to direct how what you do will look like,” he said.
Tracing the origins of zoning to the Industrial Revolution, Adeya highlighted its role in separating incompatible land uses, but warned of its misuse in enforcing segregation. “Zoning has also had a very horrible history.
In the US there was a lot of racial zoning, and in Kenya itself the 1948 master plan for a colonial capital was actually predicated on segregated zoning resolution,” he said. He noted that vestiges of colonial planning still subtly shape Nairobi’s development today.
Adeya also criticized the city’s lack of public spaces, saying historical planning failed to prioritize squares and open areas, leading to congestion and poor urban experience. “If our city had been planned along several squares with several public spaces, the density would not feel as bad,” he said.
He concluded by urging that zoning be used as a fair instrument to manage land and urban growth. “We need to be very careful that when we are dealing with zoning, we are not dealing with segregation, but we actually dealing with how do you manage the sharing of land,” he said.
