The century of the crowd

Nairobi rebuilds itself faster than it remembers itself, and the two facts are not unrelated.

A city keeps its memory in unremarkable places: the shape of a junction, a wall that used to be a doorway, the way people walk around a plot that has been empty for thirty years.

What the bulldozer takes

When those go, what is lost is not heritage in the brochure sense. It is the ordinary competence of knowing where you are.