Kenya is urbanising at a pace that its cities and towns are ill-prepared to manage. The Status of the Built Environment (SBE) Report 2025 lays bare a sobering truth: while urban growth is inevitable, our preparedness is not.
Urban planning is a constitutional obligation and a foundational tool for orderly, inclusive, and sustainable development. Planning determines where people live, how they move, how services are delivered, and ultimately, whether cities enhance the quality of life.
Kenya’s planning framework is comprehensive in law, providing a clear hierarchy of plans, ranging from the national spatial plan, inter-county plans, metropolitan plans, and county spatial plans to city-level, municipal, town, and neighborhood plans. These instruments are intended to work together to guide orderly and sustainable development.
However, the effectiveness of this framework is weakened by gaps and overlaps within the legal regime. This has underscored the urgent need to harmonise the Urban Areas and Cities Act, the County Governments Act, and the Physical and Land Use Planning Act, a reform process initiated by the State Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2025.
Notwithstanding the existence of plans in law, they have not been implemented on the ground. For instance, the National Spatial Plan (2015-2045) exists, yet there has been limited public sensitisation and little clarity on how it is being operationalised across counties. Without deliberate effort to implement and align lower-level plans to it, the plan remains largely aspirational.
Data from the National Land Commission (NLC) indicates that only 19 of 47 counties have approved County Spatial Plans. Meaning 28 counties are operating illegally without a fundamental instrument for guiding land use, infrastructure development, environmental protection, and urban growth.
More alarming is that only 202 (7.7 percent) of Kenya’s 2,636 gazetted urban centres are adequately planned. This leaves over 90 percent of towns and trading centres growing arbitrarily.
These are the spaces where informal settlements proliferate, where roads are carved out after buildings are constructed, and floods, fires, sick buildings, and building collapse become recurring tragedies rather than exceptions.
The NLC highlighted several constraints preventing counties from fulfilling their planning mandate. Inadequate budgetary allocations, weak political goodwill, and frequent political transitions disrupt continuity in planning efforts.
Planning units remain chronically understaffed, even as unemployment among built environment professionals remains alarmingly high.
A survey conducted by AAK among 1,709 graduates revealed that 90 percent of graduate and technician-level built environment professionals are unemployed- an indictment of a system that simultaneously lacks capacity and wastes available skills.
Digital transformation has also failed to take root in urban management. By December 2025, only 8 counties, Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, Kajiado, Machakos, Kilifi, and Murang’a, had online development permitting systems.
Even among these counties, systems in Nakuru, Kisumu, Machakos, and Kajiado were offline, undermining the very efficiencies digitisation is meant to deliver.
Operational online systems were also undermined by persistent challenges that delay approvals. This weakens efficiency, perpetuates discretion, delays, and has opened opportunities for malpractice in development control.
The breakdown extends to legally mandated urban governance structures. Kenya’s legal framework provides for boards, committees, and liaison mechanisms to support effective urban management.
Section 76 of the Physical and Land Use Planning Act requires every county to establish a County Physical and Land Use Planning Liaison Committee to offer a quick, non-adversarial forum for resolving planning disputes.
Yet in practice, many of these committees are either nonexistent or dysfunctional, leading to an overwhelmed Environment and Land Court and unnecessary aggravation of development matters.
For instance, the Nairobi Physical and Land Use Planning Liaison Committee was effectively dormant throughout 2025 due to the county government’s failure to facilitate its operations.
In Mombasa, the County Executive Committee Member admitted before the County Assembly on 6 November 2025 that no such committee exists. Kisumu and Marsabit appointed representatives in October 2025 and January 2025, respectively, but neither convened any meetings.
Kajiado County held only a few symposia and a kick-off meeting in June 2025, with no formal committee sittings to date. These failures point to a deeper urban governance crisis- where institutions exist on paper but are hollow in practice.
All these gaps persist against the backdrop of rapid urban growth, rising informality, an increasing number of unsafe buildings, intensifying climate change impacts, and a constitutional promise of the right to accessible, adequate, and safe housing, as well as to a clean and healthy environment.
When planning repeatedly fails, it effectively becomes a form of state-sanctioned exposure of citizens to risk, disaster, and loss of life.
Therefore, the question is not whether Kenya will urbanise, but whether it will do so by design or continue by default.
The writer is Research and Advocacy Manager at the Architectural Association of Kenya.
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