Nairobi is in the grip of a construction boom seeking to build a “world-class city” of spectacular infrastructure and gleaming high rises, inspired by neoliberal models of urban development in cities like Dubai and Kuala Lumpur. This project of raising Nairobi to new heights links the above ground to the underneath—as one construction site laborer put it to me very simply, “To build up, you must dig down.” Vast quantities of soil and rock are excavated, while urban developers try to put the city on the global map of investment opportunity. Here, as Xavier Garnier (2021, 141) has described it, the earthworks of the diggers that excavate a building’s foundations echo the workings of capital. After all, “money is the great ‘digger’ in the neoliberal regime.” Yet these swaggering projects of urban building are also prone to interruption, their neat linearity unbuilt by unpredictable politics, obdurate materials, and unforeseen events. In urban governance, unruliness has conventionally been understood as a form of disorder, undermining the smooth functioning of the city (Brook, Mooney, and Pile 2006). Instead, I explore unruliness as a more generative and heterogenous form of unbuilding, one that, instead of indicating urban breakdown, evokes the possibilities that can inhere in disruption, and the small, incremental ways it can unbuild capitalism’s earthworks.

Since 2022, as part of a bigger project on verticality and urban transformation in Nairobi, I have been tracing activities at a site par excellence of “neoliberal digging,” in a neighborhood called Upper Hill. This area is home to embassies, international corporate headquarters, and government ministries. In 2017, this was the setting for what was envisaged as the tallest building in Africa: a 300m double skyscraper named The Pinnacle. Led by a Dubai-based developer with partners from across three continents, the project was officially launched by then-President Uhuru Kenyatta and the foundations were excavated, generating a huge crater in the hillside. But by the end of 2017, the project was tied up in a complicated lawsuit with conflicting claims of land ownership and misuse of the site. The case is still unresolved, and the project is dormant: construction activity has been paused. The planned tallest building in Africa remains the largest hole in Nairobi.

Over the course of 2022, I made several visits to what I began to call the Upper Hill Hole, fascinated by its scale, but also by the incursion of plants, wildlife, and unpermitted people. The suspension of construction does not mean the site is inactive—far from it. Kingfishers swoop across the water’s surface, ducks swim, birds nest, and there are even fish in the watery depths. Nairobi is a city with a fraught history of destroying its green spaces, and the politics of environmental activism has been met with some brutal pushbacks. And yet here, under cover of what was meant to be one of the largest infrastructural projects ever in Nairobi, was now the city’s only urban lake. It was playing host to new, unexpected ecologies, including the human.

On one visit we encountered Jeremiah, when he appeared at the edge of the crater to chop wood. The wood was to feed the fire on which he was brewing tea to sell to workers employed on constructing a new highway adjacent to the site. The hole was a godsend, he said. His tiny café had no permanent structures, instead he used wooden planks propped up on building stones for benches, while a shelter was rigged up from old plastic sacking salvaged from the same highway project. At the end of every day, he disassembled his café and stored it inside the Pinnacle’s perimeter fence. He sometimes slept there too, under a tarpaulin.

The Upper Hill Hole is an example of what Bettina Stoetzer (2018) has called a ruderal ecology: “The term ruderal comes from rudus, the Latin term for rubble. A common term in ecology, it refers to communities that emerge spontaneously in disturbed environments usually considered hostile to life: the cracks of sidewalks, or the spaces alongside train tracks”—or, in this case, the abandoned foundations of a skyscraper. Neither wild nor domesticated, ruderal ecologies are best described as unruly: they offer insight not only into nonhuman urban life but “the broader, unintended ecologies of human-built structures and the multispecies worlds of which they become part” (2018, 298). These unruly ecologies are actors of unbuilding: interrupting, subverting, and changing the course of the neatly planned trajectories of urban development. They emerge in difficult, sometimes hostile, conditions; they are unruly in the sense of being beyond, more, outside, or on the edge.

This unruliness reshuffles and realigns urban space-time in ways which unbuild not only the projects but the temporality of urbanization. Reflecting on the character of urban holes amid the disconnections and breakdowns of Kinshasa, Baloji and De Boeck (2017, 143) describe “the topos of the hole” as the inverse of the mountain or the tower block: what had been, or could be, was now not. This hole in Nairobi was not just the place where a skyscraper’s concrete foundations were to be poured, but also a temporal pause. At once full of potential and equivocal, the hole prefigured the silhouettes of high-rise transformation whilst also indexing its frailties, breakdowns and hollow promises. What should have been a brief period of emptiness before being filled with concrete had stretched into a longer hiatus, enabling a whole new set of actors to intrude.

The hole’s unruly ecology seemed also to point to the hubris of humans’ attempts to build and unbuild cities. The subterranean excavations reinforced how frighteningly easy it is to intervene in the very substance of the planet, but also how surprisingly quickly the more-than-human world can reconfigure—unbuild—our infrastructural intentions into alternative assemblages. Repairing persistent urban injustices will of course take much more than the pushback of bird and plant life in an urban hole. But its unruly ecology offers a temporary refuge from Nairobi’s incessant churn of construction. A spatiotemporal hiatus in which to reflect on the forms of power at stake in shaping which lives are built and unbuilt in the disturbed landscapes of our cities.