‘Ofisi’: design, playfulness and development mimicry in Kibera’s community-based organisations

The article analyses the process of development mimicry, whereby groups of youth from Kibera, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, establish their community-based organisations (CBOs) in order to protect their precarious presence in public space, gain legitimacy, and achieve broader representation. In particular, the article introduces how Kibera’s youth design their ofisi (a Swahili term for an office) as the centres of their CBOs. The exploration reveals how the youth deploy development mimicry as a mechanism of control that simultaneously incorporates elements of playfulness and humour, enabling them to construct their own subjectivities within the constraints imposed upon them. This perspective situates development mimicry as a pluriversal urban practice, wherein the traditional teleology of development and its adjacent spatial and temporal orders are continually redesigned and playfully reinterpreted by Kibera’s residents themselves.