New Master-Planned Cities and Local Land Rights: The Case of Konza Techno City, Kenya

New cities: Power, profit, and prestige

“…Similarly, Masdar in the UAE (Cugurullo, 2017) and Yachay in Ecuador (Childs & Hearn, 2016) are part of broader national strategies to foster resilient “post‐oil” competitive economies, particularly globally connected and competitive “knowledge economies”. A growing body of scholarship investigates new cities as a strategy to boost a burgeoning information and communication technologies sector in such places as Malaysia (Bunnell, 2002, 2004; Lepawsky, 2009; Rizzo & Glasson, 2012), Kenya (Van Noorloos, Avianto, & Opiyo, 2019), South Korea (Mullins, 2017; Mullins & Shwayri, 2016; Shwayri, 2013), India (Datta, 2015), and Palestine (Dreiblatt, 2021). Conversely, other new cities are developed to support extractive economies or are the result of a resource boom and advantageous commodity prices of oil and minerals (Cain, 2014; Cardoso, 2016; Childs & Hearn, 2016; van Noorloos & Kloosterboer, 2018).…”

“…New city projects demonstrate the state-enforced processes of "urbanization as a business model" through which the conversion of rural agricultural land is legitimized and facilitated by the promise of growth and development associated with urbanization (Datta, 2015, p. 8). Recent research highlights the prominent role of the state and governments in the development of new cities and the increasingly entrepreneurial strategies they adopt to make these projects possible (Acuto, 2010;Datta, 2015Datta, , 2016Moser et al, 2015;Pitcher, 2017;van Noorloos & Kloosterboer, 2018;Watson, 2014). These modes of entrepreneurialism are shedding light on the role and mechanisms of "investor states" in the development of new cities as profitable development projects for the state (Pitcher, 2017), as well as on new regimes of dispossession in which land is increasingly expropriated for private activities that generate higher returns than agriculture, namely real estate (Levien, 2013).…”

“…4 4 It is important to note that many new cities are not being built on unused tracts of land as their builders claim; many sites have villages, farms, religious structures, Indigenous reservations, and more, all of which are cleared by builders to ensure the purity of vision of the future city (Das, 2012; Steel, Van Noorloos, & Otsuki, 2019; Van Noorloos et al, 2019). …”

“…In our own research, we treat new cities as ideological and discursive constructions and define them based on the aspirations of their builders: urban mega-developments built from scratch on a tabula rasa 4 that are designed to be both geographically and administratively separate from established cities, while projecting a distinct brand, architectural identity, and vision of the future, a sort of "mirror opposite" (Murray, 2015a) of nearby cities. However, we are less concerned with pinning down a definitive meaning of "new city" or establishing a typology of new city forms and functions (although see examples of typologies in Keeton, 2011;Keeton & Provoost, 2019;Van Noorloos & Kloosterboer, 2018) than critically examining how and why decisions to create projects branded as "new cities" are being made, how new cities are being normalized as a development strategy, and with what consequences.…”

“…Singh et al, 2019), only a handful of books examine the emergence of new cities, taking a variety of thematic perspectives. Vale's now classic book Architecture, Power, andNational Identity (2008 [1992] particularly Asia (Keeton, 2011) and Africa (Keeton & Nijhuis, 2019;Keeton & Provoost, 2019;van Noorloos & Kloosterboer, 2018). However, the recent surge of scholarship on new cities principally examines individual new city projects, leaving the field ripe for comparative studies (see Chen, Wang, & Kundu, 2009 e.g.…”