Part of the new Nairobi scene, says P.O.P., a member of the city’s famed Ukoo Flani (ADD hiphop collective, is the way people are dressing to impress. “You know, this is the only city in Kenya that’s got class,” he says. “Everywhere else, you get a guy rich as hell, but you can’t tell, he’s wearing the same down clothes as the rest. In Nairobi, even people from the ghetto dress expensive. They’re down in the markets buying second hand Hilfiger, second-hand Nike, all the stuff. Girls are spending little money but look, man, they look like they’re worth millions.”

Bushes beneath a billboard by the Westlands round-about. A metal filing cabinet guarded by a thick steel safe-door in a Museum Hill room. A bridge under construction on the Thika Road.

What do these have in common? They – and two dozen other sites dotted around Nairobi – were places where Daily Dispatches, a month-long photojournalism project just completed, found stories revealing the lives lived in this fast-evolving, emblematic African capital.

The Westlands bushes are where street kids sleep when it’s not raining. The filing cabinet, in the National Museums of Kenya’s HQ, holds the remains of Turkana Boy, the oldest modern human yet unearthed anywhere in the world.

Workers at the Thika Road site told of their pride to be fixing Nairobi’s roads, and their struggle to make ends meet on low pay for long hours.

The stories we heard from people in all three places, and the photographs we took, were edited onto poster-sized panels and emailed daily to three U.S. universities. Each morning, they printed them and hung them for an exhibition about Nairobi, which grew day by day.

The idea came from Brendan Bannon, an American photographer who’s lived in Nairobi for most of the last six years. I came on board as the writer, also having lived in Nairobi since 2004.

What was unique, we believe, about Daily Dispatches was that it gave us the opportunity to show thecity as we saw it day-to-day, as people who live here told us what the city meant to them. And in turn, people seeing the exhibition engaged with the city afresh every day for a month.

I have been working as a foreign correspondent for a British newspaper for seven years, and had become increasingly frustrated at the one-sided view of Africa, of Kenya, even of Nairobi, that was being shown in some foreign media.

For the Dispatches project, we were our own editors. We could choose to show the chaos and calamity – after all, no one can deny that for many Nairobians life is not comfortable.

But we could also show that this is a city hustling about its business with growing pride, growing individualism and growing success. These last concepts were by far the strongest to come through in more than six weeks of preparing for, and then running, Daily Dispatches.

No matter whether we were interviewing one of the top saleswomen for DT Dobie, or a businesswoman selling beauty products to the women of Kibera, that sense of ‘hard work today paying off for a better tomorrow’ appeared to define Nairobians.

Many Dispatches matched this pattern. The DT Dobie showroom. The Olympic Business Organisation in Kibera. The business-minded rap revolution of hip hop ghetto star Octopizzo Even those Westlands street kids.

Weekends, it’s time to party. Jairus Mulela mans this BBQ outside KP’s bar on Utalii Lane, where he works indoors the rest of the week. Nairobi’s revellers, he says, are mostly well-behaved, and “they can be quite funny”. Things get tough for him, though, when it’s busy

and “people crowd around...that’s when someone can steal a sausage without you being able to do anything about it”. Mulela, who’s 23, has been in this job for four years. “I’m a good cook,” he adds.

Nairobi’s “changing”, says Richie Rich of Ukoo Flani hiphop collective. The city’s smart set call it the “New York of Africa”, where “there’s no time to stop”, where there’s a party every night, he says. “There’s a lot moving here. Guys are feeling there’s a hype about the place, it’s picking up. Money’s moving around. People have it, or they’re chasing it”

And in a city, which has long been defined by its contrasts, by the gaps between people according to their incomes, something exciting and new is happening.

Technological advances, forged by cheap access to web enabled mobile phones, are connecting people across the city in ways that have not been seen before. That was the subject of our last Dispatch, on April 30th, and for me it shows most clearly the promise of that better tomorrow for which we are all working so hard.

All of the Daily Dispatches can be seen at www.dailydispatches.org. We plan to bring the exhibition to Nairobi – and add fresh Dispatches – in September or October.