“Touching the Tarmac”: Conjuring the Urban Frontier on a Remote Periphery

Anthropologists have demonstrated how the creation of land markets as “frontiers” for global capital requires practices of “conjuring”—the narrative construction of place as desirable for large‐scale investment. This article emphasizes the contingency of this conjuring process in an urbanizing Kenya where land‐selling companies have emerged to mediate the market by purchasing remote holdings and subdividing them into smaller plots for resale to middle‐class buyers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with these companies and prospective buyers, it shows how the former pitch their plots as speculative investments by narrating the prospect of a vibrant urban future itself —that city sprawl will arrive soon enough, driving up land values. In turn, would‐be buyers carry out their own due diligence, gauging these anticipatory visions for flaws. Site visits to prospective plots bring this persuasion game into focus—instances in which remoteness of “prime land” is revealed, scuppering transactions. The article closes by underscoring the challenges of successfully turning remote land on city edges into “assets of allure” when its material affordances and obdurate histories disrupt its representation as a desirable landscape for investment.