Nairobi, May 5 -- There is a particular kind of chaos that only urban planners fully appreciate. It is not the dramatic chaos of a building collapse, though Nairobi has had those too. It is the slow, grinding chaos of a city where every individual decision makes perfect economic sense and the collective outcome is a catastrophe. Welcome to Westlands.

Westlands was designed as a low-rise residential neighbourhood, a leafy address for the upper middle class, with controlled commercial activity at its edges. Today, 20-to-30-storey towers jostle for airspace above what were once single-family plots.

City Hall confirmed in February 2026 that all seven of Westlands' original sub-estates, among them Spring Valley, Parklands, Loresho, and Rhapt...