Karen Village
Artist village of studios and workshops on land its owner rented cheap instead of selling to developers.
This guide to Karen Village in Nairobi tells how businessman Anthony Athaide, sitting on ten idle acres of prime Karen real estate, walked into Ramoma Gallery in two thousand sixteen and made working artists an unusual offer: build studios on his land and pay almost nothing. It sets that gamble against the booming property market circling Karen, where the same acreage could have anchored a shopping centre. Potters, glassblowers, and stonemasons turned those borrowed sheds into a working village, built on the bet that cheap space, not expensive retail, was what this city's creative economy needed.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.