Condominium Housing in Addis Ababa: Urban Commons as a Bridge between the Spatial and the Social

Abstract

A point of departure of this paper is the hypothesis that the quotidian practices of communities and their socio-economic and cultural characteristics are interconnected with the spatial attributes of co-housing practices. The paper focuses on the examination of the collaboration of the Ethiopian government collaborated with the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) that intended to address the issues related to the mass housing program in Addis Ababa. Special attention is paid to the so-called "UN-Habitat", a Human Settlements programme of the United Nations established in 1978 aiming to enhance the urban future. In 2005, the City Administration of Addis Ababa initiated a large-scale housing development project in order to address urban poverty and improve the living conditions of low and middle-income residents. To grasp the specificity of the Ethiopian context, one should bear in mind that in 2014 only 20.7% of Ethiopian residents lived in urban settlements as a report of the United Nations published that same year informs us. Departing from the fact that from 2006 to 2016 the area of condominium housing has increased to occupy 11% of the area of the city of Addis Ababa (fig. 1), the paper examines the tensions between universal aspirations and local realities in the case of Ethiopia's most ambitions mass housing scheme, which is 'Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program' (AAGHP) and was launched in 2004. This program was integrated in the 'Integrated Housing Development Program' (IHDP) in 2006. The particularity of the urban redevelopment of Addis Ababa lies in the fact that, in contrast with the majority of the "new city" approaches, it incorporated and permitted the construction of low-income housing thanks to the IHDP, which contributed significantly to the acceleration of the production of social housing in Ethiopia. My objective is to shed light on the common codes and conventions characterising the production of condominium housing in Addis Ababa, on the one hand, and to render explicit how the fact that space-as-commons functions a set of social relations which potentially challenges the very foundations of ownership becomes evident in the case of urban redevelopment of Addis Ababa, on the other hand.