Jennifer Robinson and others have called on urban scholars to engage in greater "formal comparative reflection" on urban development and policymaking in order to internationalize contemporary urban theory. Whereas Robinson's call addresses explictly the current neoliberal moment, this paper demonstrates that urban policy learning and complex networks among governments in the cities of former British colonies were already established after independence in the 1960s. In support of this claim, the paper explores the attraction of the Singapore model as a solution to Kenya's urban housing shortage following independence. In 1971, a Kenyan delegation consisting of representatives from the Ministries of Housing, Finance and Planning, Health, Lands, and the Nairobi City Council took a 6 day trip to Singapore to examine how Singapore had solved its housing deficit. Celebrating the quality and efficiency of the Singaporean government's approach to urban residential development, the Kenyan delegation produced a detailed 58-page report exhaustively describing the reasons for Singapore's policy success. Members of the delegation then argued strongly for the implementation of the Singapore model in Nairobi and other Kenyan cities. Using archival material from the Kenya National Archives on the study trip to Singapore and its aftermath, my paper shows that government officials in Kenya and Singapore were already engaged in policy learning and building interconnections among postcolonial cities quite soon after independence. These findings call attention to the "lumpiness" (to borrow from Fred Cooper) of urban internationalization- it belongs neither to the moment of neoliberalism nor to globalization but ebbs and flows over time and across regions.