To inhabit the city is to inhabit a layered and contentious space, a space whose meaning cannot be comprehended without closely navigating its layers. This article analyses two images and representations – a tweet and a song – as narrative forms that reveal the palimpsestic nature of Nairobi in the context of the city’s expressway, which was constructed between September 2020 and July 2022. I read the expressway as a physical infrastructure for mobility as well as a material and metaphorical representation of urban marginalization, which at the same time materializes various forms of social marginalization and exclusion that predate it. The narrative forms, critically analysed together, underscore the palimpsestic nature of the city that would otherwise be obscured should readers be blinded by the iconicity of the expressway. I consider both the images, the tweet and the song alongside the arguments of Michel de Certeau, Karin Barber and Setha Low on urban aesthetics. While de Certeau provides lenses through which we understand the practices of everyday life in the city, Barber makes a case for urban infrastructure and the growth of popular culture, and Low focuses on how power relations influence the social construction of space. Ultimately, I argue for a reading of urban spaces using a synthesized literary approach as a nuanced way of understanding such spaces. This approach weaves together different media and approaches – both textual and visual – in its reading of the materialities of urban spaces and how meaning is constructed and contested within those spaces.

The ubiquitous presence of motorbike taxi drivers on the streets of Kampala, Uganda, has long been the subject of academic inquiry. This article interrogates the visible political symbols displayed on the motorbikes and the clothing of drivers, arguing that the aesthetic choices of drivers offer new ways of imagining Ugandan state pasts and futures. While the 2021 Ugandan presidential election has often been framed as a binary choice between President Museveni and Robert Ssentamu (popularly known by his stage name Bobi Wine), I propose that drivers’ conscious decision to display divergent political symbols must be understood through the history of cosmopolitanism in Kampala. Taking seriously the diversity of political visions suggested by the aesthetic markers of drivers enables us to appreciate the multifaceted challenges and possibilities for Uganda’s political future.

The article interrogates the livelihood responses that households in marginal farming and fishing communities rely on as ways of adapting to environmental degradation due to oil spillages and gas flaring in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. It demonstrates how local perceptions and understandings of environmental pollution help communities frame livelihood responses to environmental problems in their domain. Relying on an analysis of ethnographic field-based data, the article identifies a plurality of adaptation strategies in farming and fishing. It reveals that these strategies are palliative and unable to mitigate the long-term environmental effects of oil and gas extraction in the region. This situation incentivizes a gradual shift from farming and fishing to crude oil-based livelihood activities, particularly artisanal crude oil refining, known as ‘kpo-fire’. The study foregrounds kpo-fire as a predominant maladaptive response, which, despite being an economic alternative for many, exacerbates environmental pollution; this results in a vicious circle, which is emblematic of what the article refers to as the ‘livelihood dysfunction trap’.