Shelter, Sanitation and Race in Liverpool and Colonial Nairobi

Contrasting colony and metropole, Kenyan and British nation states and a pair of 'slums' known as Everton and Kibera, this book provides a social history of variations in inequality based on overlapping and conflicting conceptions of race, class and gender in the 'long' twentieth century. It is a study of how ordinary people in two very different communities—one in Liverpool, the other in Nairobi—coped with unequal access to the basic necessities of life. The book follows a linear narrative that intertwines the histories of the people of Everton and Kibera. As a history that compares, the chapters use the metrics of shelter and sanitation to reveal important connections and congruencies that require a reconsideration of slums, planning, urban clearance and renewal, identity formation and the imperial metropole/periphery binary.