Sustainable and affordable housing:

The global urban population is projected to grow rapidly in the coming years, leading to an increase in housing demand that is not always met with adequate supply of quality housing. In the low-middle-income context of Kenya, this gap has led to the proliferation of sub-standard housing implementations, with significant social and environmental impacts. However, attention is rarely paid to sustainable housing design practices in Kenya, understood here as climate-responsive and socially integrated adaptations, despite their proven capacity in other developing countries for reducing environmental impacts while making housing more affordable.

The city of Nairobi presents potential for alternative trajectories of development in the construction industry as one of the fastest-growing urban areas in the region with unique climatic conditions that are underutilized and understudied in the building sector. This thesis explores, through the perspectives of local actors, the potential and challenges of implementing affordable housing in Nairobi by using sustainable, locally-based strategies. This was achieved through desktop research, semi-structured interviews with key actors from across government, academia, and industry backgrounds, as well as a field visit to a development site.

The collected data was then analyzed qualitatively through thematic content analysis and triangulated to extract relevant learnings. The key findings of this research are that there is a lot of potential in Nairobi for locally adapted housing strategies to respond to affordable housing issues and provide low-cost and high-quality alternatives due to its climatic conditions and socio-cultural traditions. Yet there are some structural challenges in terms of policy framing and local perceptions of sustainability that limit the implementation of such practices in the Nairobi housing sector.

This thesis adds to the critical discussion of adequate affordable housing by providing a holistic view of the differing or overlapping perspectives in the field, deriving potentials of the local context, and providing an understanding that could help guide the housing industry in the direction of resilient and inclusive housing opportunities. The study suggests the need for further research into the implementation of sustainable and affordable housing in the context of Nairobi, as well as the wider regional context.

Globally, the urban population is projected to grow from 3.6 billion in 2011 to 6.3 billion in 2050, with the majority of this growth happening in developing countries (Adabre et al, 2020; Gan et al., 2017, UN-Habitat, 2012). In Africa specifically, urban residents are expected to grow from 11.2% to 20.2% of the total population in those same years (Addy et al., 2022).

This will inevitably lead to an increase in housing demand in urban areas, which is already apparent today. However, the current housing sector is struggling to cope with this increasing demand, with the deficit of adequate housing being a global problem (Adetooto et al., 2020; Moghayedi et al., 2021). In developing countries, this issue is apparent, with a growing number of urban residents moving to sub-standard housing due to the lack of affordable housing supply geared towards lower and middle-income households (Adabre et al, 2020). In Kenya, this has led to the proliferation of informal settlements around large urban areas, as people cannot find adequate housing within the city (Gachanja et al., 2023).

Indeed, this expanding gap between housing demand and supply, in these contexts especially, has been found to push the housing sector towards “less efficient and more expensive solutions, and new city dwellers towards informal (and often illegal) independent construction of dwellings” (Wallbaum et al., 2012, p.354), Accommodating the lower income households and improving their quality of life is a central challenge in the urbanization process of developing countries (Gan et al., 2017).

These constructions, as well as the increasing world urban population, have a significant and nonnegligible impact on the environment. Today, the building sector accounts for approximately 30% of global carbon emissions and environmental pollution, as well as 30-50% of global energy use. In Africa, it is 54% of the primary energy consumed by this sector, while in Kenya specifically, this number is approximately 47%, with the residential sector accounting for the majority of this usage (Edge & IFC, 2021; Manzano-Agugliaro et al., 2015; UN-Habitat, 2016b).