New book highlights human toll of the Kenyan property boom
As Nairobi鈥檚 skyline climbs ever higher, life for those living on the city鈥檚 edges is being transformed - and not always for the better.
In a powerful new book, , Dr Peter Lockwood of The University of Manchester tells the human stories behind Kenya鈥檚 rapid urban expansion and the families being left behind.
Based on years of living and working alongside residents in Kiambu County - an area just north of Nairobi where farmland is giving way to housing estates and shopping malls - Lockwood鈥檚 book captures a quiet but profound social upheaval. It reveals how fathers, once proud smallholders, are selling off ancestral plots of land, leaving their sons landless and adrift in a volatile economy.
鈥淟and in Kiambu has become unimaginably valuable,鈥� says Lockwood. 鈥淔or some families, it鈥檚 a ticket out of hardship. For others, selling land means losing not only their home but their history.鈥�
Through vivid portraits of everyday lives - farmers, young jobseekers, mothers struggling to make ends meet - Peasants to Paupers explores what happens when the dream of a stable, middle-class future collides with the harsh realities of unemployment, soaring land prices and changing family values.
The book opens with Mwaura, a young man watching his father sell their family鈥檚 last piece of land to developers. What follows is both a personal tragedy and a reflection of a wider trend: as land becomes a commodity, generations of Kenyans are being cut off from the security that once defined rural life.
Kiambu鈥檚 story is not just about Kenya - it鈥檚 about how global cities expand into their rural surroundings, and how markets, speculation and inequality reshape communities everywhere from Nairobi to Lagos to London.
The book tells a deeply human story of hope and heartbreak. It shows how moral ideas about family, work and responsibility are being tested as young people face shrinking opportunities and elders grapple with impossible choices between survival and legacy.
Lockwood, a Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political Economy at 91直播, brings a journalist鈥檚 eye for storytelling to his anthropological research. His work has previously been published in leading journals, and he co-curated Nairobi Becoming (2024), an ethnographic portrait of the Kenyan capital.
Peasants to Paupers is published by Cambridge University Press as part of the prestigious International African Library series and is freely available online under open access, ensuring that readers in Kenya and around the world can engage with its findings.