In this episode of Africa Knows, we speak with Dr. Musyimi Mbathi, Senior Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Nairobi.

Drawing on over 20 years of experience across academia, government and the United Nations, Dr. Mbathi reflects on what it means to train the next generation of urban planners.

He discusses the importance of exposing students to real-world urban complexities, grounding research in society’s needs, and embracing participatory approaches to planning.

From informality and resilience to governance and economic development, this conversation explores why the future is urban, and why African cities need planners who are ready for it.

David Ehrhardt

Welcome back to Africa Knows. This week we hear from Dr. Musimi Mbathi, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Nairobi's Department of Urban and Regional Planning.

He has over 20 years of experience in academia and in the professional sphere, including at the United Nations.

In this episode, Dr. Mbathi talks about the importance of exposing students to urban complexities, being duty bound to the needs of society, and the idea that the future is urban. Recording may be a little bit more noisy than usual, but it's very rich in content, so enjoy. And here is Dr. Mbathi.

Musimi Mbathi

For the civil service. I served for more than 10 years, 11 years and for that matter, and the United nations for four years.

And I was in a program that was dealing with, as I said before, geographic information systems integration in Latin America, Africa and Asia. And that was a program that lasted four good years and with an intention of supporting a thousand organizations or cities globally.

Charity Mwangi

That's quite some skill, working in Latin America, Africa and Asia to impact a thousand cities. So what inspired you to leave that space, the professional space, and join the academia space?

Did you always want to become a part of the academic space or fraternity?

Musimi Mbathi

I like your question because every year I get an opportunity to interact with new students coming to the university and I ask them the same question. How many of them would wish to join academia? None of them would be willing to do that. Absolutely.

Same, If I was in that space as a young graduate, if you asked me the same question, I would probably have told you no. I don't see myself in academia. I would have wished to join big time organizations, the United Nations or even government.

But academia was second to me in terms of choices. I think what propelled me to joining the academia when I in the United Nations.

The current chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning was Professor Peter Ngao asked me to volunteer my Friday afternoons because he knew that all Friday afternoons UN members of staff have a free time. So he said that it would be useful for me to come and volunteer and support in the mentoring of young postgraduate students.

So I started off with the postgraduate students and this has given me a good opportunity, of course, to meet new people, students and also interact with other university collaborators. I think I also got into this space because it has helped me to learn new things and think innovation.

I have the privilege of sitting with students through their research.

I'm able to learn quite a lot in terms of research and quite a lot in terms of how to engage differently with cities, with settlements, with communities. I think that has a big impact on the Way I teach and also on the way our cities are managed.

So just bringing fresh ideas and coming across or interacting with fresh ideas, this gives me great privilege and I'm encouraged to be an academician and researcher.

Charity Mwangi

It's quite inspiration.

The graduate, you joined the academic space by just volunteering your Fridays now to being a full time professor in the academic space and getting to impact people through innovation and knowledge exchange.

So maybe just to follow up further, what are some of the key aspects of your work that ideally get you to think and talk and you know, to get you just inspired more.

Musimi Mbathi

About my work, like I just mentioned before, I am privileged to network a lot with civil society, network a lot with government, network a lot with non state actors and communities alike. So in this space I get to learn a lot.

I get to understand what challenges, what new things and innovations all these actors have to bring to the table. I cannot say that by sitting in the university, being a researcher that I'm exposed to the best. No, no, no.

I think people out there, communities and cities have a lot that they can be able to impact on our lives as researchers. So I enjoy that.

And again, listening to students all the time, doing research and supporting them and mentoring them, I'm in a space where I am overly engaging with innovation and research and new ideas and best practices. So that is one thing that I value about my work and interactions and linkages that I have.

Charity Mwangi

Thank you so much.

It's quite inspiring to see the humility of being in the academic space which produces lot of action oriented research, but also finding it as a space where you get to learn every day from civil society and also from the communities. Now drawing closer to the classroom, how can you describe,... how is a typical class for you?

Musimi Mbathi

I support the training of urban planners and I also support the training of architects. Classes would range from, in terms of numbers from 40 to about 70, sometimes 80. And those are not very large classes.

But at postgraduate level we have up to 15, 20 students per class. Again, that is much smaller.

However, one thing that defines my classes is the way we, we bring in theory or principles and foundations and also blend that with practical experiences. Now these two ought to be speaking to each other.

The more we talk about principles and foundations, we need to back that with practical experiences where these foundations, where these theories have worked and what benefit and why they are important so that students are able to realize how important it is to stick to theories and how practical they are.

But as well with these practical experiences, we are now able to come up with new ways of thinking, new principles, new approaches that were not there earlier on during our mentoring days. Example, the whole dynamic of community participation and inclusiveness, this approach was not there.

Charity Mwangi

Thank you so much for that.

And it's quite inspiring to see how to combine theory and practice in order to come up with robust solutions, but more importantly, to be able to, you know, help students to transition to these professional spaces seamlessly.

Now, with these experiences that you have in the classroom and your everyday interaction with the students, what are some of the key challenges that you experience in teaching and how do you address? How do you address them?

Musimi Mbathi

The teaching of the professional today requires that you are up to date in terms of data, you are up to date in terms of tools and equipment that you are going to use for instruction.

Sometimes we teach and instruct students from very humble backgrounds who are required to have at their disposal a good mobile phone, a laptop and all that. But because of their background, some of them are not able to afford these equipment.

So that is a big challenge and you would not wish to see a student lagging behind because of tools.

This forces us, for example, to try and use means like sharing or even seeking support from our networks and partners partners to be able to get these tools for the disposal of our students. Secondly, another challenge could be or is the issue of data.

We are operating in a world in a situation where we require a lot of data and some of this data is not readily available, some of it is outdated. I find this a big challenge in our setting.

But we are fortunate enough to be linked to organizations, linked to people who have this data at their disposal from their day to day work and also from their organization's interaction in planning. So that way we are able to overcome these shortages. Another shortage or challenge that we have is student exposure to current practices.

Of course, we have limited organizations and many students who would wish to be attached.

However, for some reason we are able to use our good networks to place these students in internships and also attachments which give them practical experience.

So that challenge is overcome by just developing good networks with partners we have out there, be it government and non government, non state actors, just to give our students good exposure. Because it would not be fair to have a student graduating and they have little experience on what goes on out there.

Charity Mwangi

That is quite inspiring that the power of partnerships between the academic and the practice world is able to even help the students get the important data that they need and also to help them transition to spaces of work. Now to the next question.

How do you teach your students to engage in complex problems that are likely to face them at the academic space and even in the practice world when they transition to start working?

Musimi Mbathi

You're very right. In the spaces that we work in, the urban space is very complex. It's very complex.

But we do not run away from these complex complexities and, you know, uncertainties, risks. First and foremost, we reflect a lot on best practice.

If we face a problem here, the complexity here, this is not the only place we can face it or is experienced in the world. So by being exposed to best practices globally, we are able to find ways and means.

Communities around the globe have been able to address the same complexity and domesticate it out here. Number two, we value the partner and networks that we have.

This way, our students, right from the beginning, the first year, our students are able to understand and interact with real world problems so that by the time they are graduating, they have had a feel, they have had exposure, and they have had a way of appreciating some of these dynamics and gone ahead also to come up with innovative ways for addressing this. So this is a revolving thing.

So year in, year out, day in, day out, we are able to give our students in class and outside class that required exposure and it is exposure to the urban complexities and how to resolve them.

So we stand in a good place and our students too turn out to be excellent graduates who are able to jump into the deep end of things and support the quest to make our cities more sustainable, more resilient and useful and beneficial to urban residents.

Charity Mwangi

Thank you so much.

It's quite important, what you've mentioned, that it's very important to expose students to urban complexities, that they're able to develop real world solutions and for them to be able to see things from a global lens, to develop contextual solutions. And yeah, borrowing on that, we now look at a bit about research and the approach that you've been using in research practices.

So the question that I'll ask you is, how did you come up with your key research topics and what did you find important about them?

Musimi Mbathi

I'm very interested in learning more about informality in our cities.

And this comes from my earlier experience when I was in civil service after my postgraduate degree in geographic information systems and remote sensing from Netherlands. My first assignment was to support the government of Kenya come up with an upgrading plan for Kibera, which is the biggest informal settlement in Nairobi and also the country. Now, Kibera, with more than 17,000 structures and a population of 300,000.

Using GIS, we were able to map each and every structure, their characteristics, dynamics, EPC population and the service level. And all this information. Now that has up to date given me an opportunity to advance in research within informal settlements.

They are much smaller settlements, but we are able now to use these technologies across the country and also Africa to be able to understand them better again. My research profile and portfolio is also influenced a lot by our partners.

I work a lot with civil society partners, Slum Dwellers International, Pamoja Trust. I'm working with World Vision.

I'm also working with Consign and all these organizations have a lot to do with informal settlements, economic livelihoods and economic development, infrastructure and services.

So in a way I'm able to shape my research agenda and profile with contemporary issues as guided by partners on the ground, by organizations on the ground, and also by global agendas like resilience, sustainability and the like.

Charity Mwangi

Thank you so much.

And of course that has brought a new dynamic that you've mentioned, your collaboration with partners, which is quite instrumental in getting the work to move.

So what are some of the challenges that you may have faced while working with the partners, both in the academy and non academic spaces?

Musimi Mbathi

Challenges that we face? Number one, there are so many organizations, there are so many communities and cities that require our support. We can only do so much.

So an academic institution, even bringing together all the academic institutions, training planners in this country, we're not able to reach out to each and every community, settlement and city out here in the Republic. So human resource is a big challenge.

I find that a good thing because it gives us the impetus to see how to enhance our human resource and also other resources at our disposal to make a bigger impact. So it is a challenge. At the same time it is a motivator. Number two is about synchronizing, sometimes, community and organizations wants.

Yes, we are an academic institution driven by academic agenda. So sometimes it is difficult to synchronize calendars, to synchronize approaches. So that becomes a challenge.

But that also challenge motivates us to think outside the box and see how well to accommodate new thinking, how well to accommodate new ones so that we match and we are able to meet expectations of society. I'm from a public university, a public institution for that matter. So I'm duty bound to always reflect on the needs and requirements of society.

So at that level, we are able to overcome those challenges and use them as motivators to take us to the next level of our work.

Charity Mwangi

Thank you so much. Now, speaking of human resource, what topics would you advise the next generation of PhD students to focus on?

Musimi Mbathi

The future is urban. So I'm looking at the next 20, 30 years, the year 2050 and beyond.

The students that we are training today, the graduates that we are training today, will definitely be the urban managers of tomorrow. And you know, this is now unprecedented that in future many of our communities populations will be urban.

So now that takes us to the next level where we will need to train our planners to think about engaging and resolving challenges that will be presented by this unprecedented future. Number one, they have got to think economic development.

Those same cities must provide employment, must provide livelihood opportunities, must provide meaningful engagement to the youth, especially so we cannot run away from that as planners. Number two, we've got also to think management and governance of those spaces. Cities will grow. Towns and markets of today will be cities of tomorrow.

That is not, that is not a small aspect to think through. It is a big deal.

So we will require managers, we will require planners, we will require engineers to think and think very smart about how to manage such large human settlements of urban in nature. Now the more cities grow, the more risks and uncertainties are associated with them. So matters resilience and the environment are critical.

10, 20 years ago, matters flooding were not so pronounced in the city of Nairobi. Today we have two rainy seasons and in each season, every year we have flooding. This is something that we're not so used to.

And this comes about because of the change in the way land use has come about. More and more surfaces are now paved and that translates to more runoff and more runoff translates to greater risk of flooding. So there we go.

So as our cities grow, we have, we have big challenges of flooding coming through.

Equally, I saw that during the COVID times, many populations globally, especially those living in urban areas, which are much more denser than the rural areas, suffered a lot from the COVID pandemic. So I can say our cities now are faced with greater challenges going forward. So I do believe that this is something that they need to think through.

Charity Mwangi

Absolutely.

Thinking through resilience, building economic development, environmental restoration and governance as a way of achieving holistic urban development. Now moving still within the PhD conversation, what advice do you have for the next generation of PhD students and the young academics in general?

Musimi Mbathi

As a PhD student, you cannot delink yourself from theory, from concepts. That is fine. But I think the PhD student, the graduate of today, number one, ought to be linked with reality.

Society now demands that research ought to have a big impact, ought to have a direct impact on our cities, on our people. That, number one link with reality is key.

Number two is about the choice of topics and see whether you can be able to conduct research in a situation of data abundance. I don't think it would be a good thing to tackle or handle topics which are data insufficient.

So data, data is critical and also support and explore existing networks. The world is now becoming globalized and as scholars in the south, we stand to benefit a lot from resources and opportunities up north.

Be it data, be it scholarships, be it information, be it new methodologies, we stand a lot to benefit. Equally, the north stands to benefit a lot from the south, could be data, could be knowledge, could be information, could be research cases.

So both worlds stand to benefit a lot if they engage a lot in networks and support.

So I do think the next generation of PhDs would benefit a lot from this globalization aspect if they are to tap into the institutional linkages and also personal linkages that exist.

Charity Mwangi

Absolutely. Now moving the focus a little bit to methodologies.

This is quite related to the research topic that we've just discussed, but I want to understand more on what are your methodological approaches and you know, linking them to what you aim to achieve or the contributions you aim to fulfill. Therefore, the first question would be how would you describe your methodological approach to research?

Musimi Mbathi

In my earlier statements I alluded to significant community engagements to significant non state actors and also state actors linkages. Now this has driven us to methodologies which are more inclusive methodologies which are participatory in nature.

We have now moved on from top down to bottom up approaches to planning. And as a methodology, participatory approaches are critical in the way we teach. Yes, we teach principles and foundations.

But now more and more we are finding the voice and energies of participation very critical in the way we teach. So my methodology is shaped greatly with practice, with academia linkages, and I'm happy and proud of that.

Charity Mwangi

That's absolutely fascinating. Just getting to be informed by practice and also adopting a collaborative and co production approach to research. And, you know, aligned to that, can you take us through why you chose this methodological approach of collaboration and co production?

Musimi Mbathi

I chose this because, as I had earlier said, the urban dynamics are very complex. I think it is important that as a professional you are in touch with reality and for you to be in touch with reality.

For you to be in touch with your city, for you to be in touch with the settlement and the communities living within them. It is important that you, you step down and get to the level of the subject that you're dealing with.

And this can only be realized by asking the right questions to the right people at the right time, in the right place.

This participatory approach is of immense value to us and I do believe going forward it will continue to shape the way we think, the way we innovate, and the way we come up with plans for our cities.

Charity Mwangi

Thank you so much.

And speaking of collaboration and co production processes, could you take us through the approach that you use to bring on board the interdisciplinary collaborations, especially as part of your methodological approach?

Musimi Mbathi

A city is a very complex environment that we are dealing with all professionals, be it the agriculture expert, engineers, our doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, planners find their way and space into this. So as planners, we are fortunate enough to work with the entire spectrum of professionals as we manage our cities.

Starting off with agriculture and food production experts. A city without food, a city that is food insecure, definitely is a city that is not attractive to people.

So we sit in and listen to best practices by our agriculture experts on how to enhance and how to plan to accommodate, for example, food production within our city. We don't need large farms.

We can do kitchen gardening, we can do rooftop gardening, and we can also advocate for rearing of animals within very small spaces. That already is agriculture. Speaking to the urban planner the COVID pandemic taught us a lot.

And this is why now we appreciate public health and also health experts views on how we should design our spaces to ensure that people have better air circulation, we avoid overcrowding, and we provide for utilities and infrastructure to enhance the health of our communities. We are talking about culture and social dynamics.

We also have an opportunity to design green spaces so that people can socialize more, so that people can find space to express themselves culturally. They could use the same green spaces to carry out performances, use the same spaces to play and exchange ideas.

All these come about because of best practices whispered to us by other disciplines which are relevant in our space and security as well. We interact a lot with security, with security teams, so that we are able to design our cities better, to offer more safety and crime reduction.

The design of streets, for example, contributes a lot to having spaces more secure, having spaces more public and having spaces more spaces where we are able to have 24 hour vigilance that surveillance is an important aspect design. So the way you design roads, the way you design blocks is influenced a lot by crime and safety dynamics.

Charity Mwangi

Thank you so much.

The power of interdisciplinary collaboration for harmony and integration of solutions. To my last question: what methods would you advise the next generation of scholars to focus on and why would you advise on these methods?

Musimi Mbathi

So some of the methods that scholars should embrace will include bottom up approaches to planning, which has a lot to do with community engagements. Other approaches of course, the next scholars will be trying to come up with innovative ways in terms of research which speak to the African challenge, the African challenge in terms of economic development, the African challenge in terms of environmental dynamics, and also the African challenge of in terms in terms of resilience.

So I do believe that the next generation of scholars should focus more on matters that are critical and very close to the same people that we are planning for. Yes, theory, principles and foundations, those are important.

But I think, and I do believe that our communities are now ready to listen to voices from professional voices which help them to manage challenges and also ensure that they are able to meet the objectives of development going into the future.

David Ehrhardt

Thanks for listening and we hope you've enjoyed this conversation. There'll be many more to follow, so stay tuned.

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