Mombasa in the Second Cold War: Logistics polyalignment and the making of the gatekeeper city

Over the past two decades, the city of Mombasa has undergone significant spatial transformations resulting from multiple large-scale infrastructure projects aimed at improving logistics efficiency along the Northern Economic Corridor (NEC). The Chinese-led Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) and the Japanese-led Mombasa Port Development Program (MPDP) particularly stand out due to their far-reaching effects on national and regional networks of commodity circulation. Although developed by competing powers and connected to rival connectivity agendas that unfold within the Second Cold War (CWII), their material integration drives urban change in Mombasa. This article analyzes the MPDP/SGR interface as manifesting Kenya’s logistics polyalignment—a mode of foreign engagement through which successive ruling coalitions leverage rival powers to produce transnationally oriented corridors and urban nodes. I demonstrate how, on the one hand, this mode of engagement plays out within a regional context shaped by geopolitical-economic rivalries over corridor centrality—a process that has gradually produced the NEC as materially polyaligned . On the other hand, I foreground how the material integration of projects connected to rival connectivity strategies in Mombasa has contingently transformed the city into a gatekeeper city . This urban form emerges as the MPDP/SGR nexus becomes a site of multiscalar power struggles over the circulation, distribution, and capture of value, where competing agendas advanced by rival state and non-state actors converge, with important implications for urban economies and livelihoods.