Addis Abeba's Concrete Promises Face Hard Costs in Urban Overhaul

Addis Abeba's Concrete Promises Face Hard Costs in Urban Overhaul

Jul 19 , 2025. By Ahmed T. Abdulkadir ( AhmedT. Abdulkadir (ahmedteyib.abdulkadir@addisfortune.net) is the Editor-in-Chief at Addis Fortune. With a critical eye on class dynamics, public policy, and the cultural undercurrents shaping Ethiopian society. )

On a chilly Addis Abeba morning, Ginfile, the dense quarter otherwise known as "5Kilo," wakes to the hiss of charcoal stoves and the smell of buna. Neighbours swap greetings across courtyards that double as kitchens and workshops. Children weave through alleys, ducking laundry lines and vendors’ trays.

A few blocks away, BalchaWoldeChilot Condominium in the "4Kilo" area greets the same dawn with doors opening onto quiet hallways. Wide stairwells are spotless, the units selfcontained, and the hush still underlines a muted kind of progress. These are areas that remind us that the contemporary African metropolis is constantly evolving with bulldozers and blueprints. Some cities are divided by rivers, while others are divided by highways.

However, in the march toward modernisation, well-meaning initiatives split towns not by class or creed, but by two ways of life. One is cast in poured concrete and plumbing, the other held together by shared injera and whispered favours.

Official promises arrive in smooth language, where thousands of new units, hardhat jobs, upgraded pipes and pavements. Then demolition rattles quarters labelled “slums” only by outsiders. At the end come mid-rise blocks with elevators, latrines, and, in theory, a mortgage. The path from shack to showroom, though, winds through unintended consequences, including lost income, fractured kin networks, and a gnawing sense of exile.

The Integrated Housing Development Program, launched in 2005, targeted 400,000 condominium units, 200,000 construction jobs and a 50pc cut in slum coverage. By the time the cranes slowed, more than 300,000 units stood, and over half a million jobs had been tallied. These are numbers any minister would cheer. Yet Addis Abeba paid a hidden price.

In the six years beginning in 2009, crews scraped away 392hct of innercity fabric, winding passageways, corrugated iron homes and shaded porches where coffee vendors served pensioners and students. Time there ran on conversation, not contracts. Rough as the quarters looked, they followed unwritten codes. Nearly 23,000 households were uprooted, each woven into a network richer than any infrastructure ledger could reveal.

Space itself was an economic engine where public and private blurred. A doorway became a storefront, and a courtyard, a workshop for injera or laundry. Nearly half of the residents earned income from informal trade, and more than 80pc did so within walking distance. Gross domestic product (GDP) never recorded the value of such social capital, but the urban poor relied on it every day.

Standing at the courtyard gate, an elderly resident recalled how a single shout once summoned neighbours to lift a sick child, fix a roof, or lend the day’s sugar. These were tiny transactions of trust that cannot be loaded onto a moving truck after the bulldozer has passed.

Planners, fixated on “exchange value,” tracked square meters, market price and skyline aesthetics. Housing theorist JohnF.C.Turner warned that a dwelling’s real worth rests in its “use value,” what it does for occupants. The tinroofed units razed by IHDP were more than shabby shelters. They generated income, provided childcare and stored the city’s social energy. Uniform blocks with uniform rules drained that value.

Granted, condominium life brought undeniable hardware upgrades, including running water, private toilets, and sturdy walls. Still, the new blocks often sat on the capital’s rim, approximately 15Km from former homes. Jobs vanished or lengthened into costly commutes. Tailoring shops, teff grinders and kiosks struggled to restart. Some families endured multiple relocations as later projects steamrolled the sites meant to be permanent.

This blind spot, where hardware takes precedence over human software, persists in renewal strategies from Lagos to Nairobi. Engineers sign off on pipes and lifts; sociologists arrive later to map the rubble of relationships. Policy papers list latrines per floor, not livelihoods per block. In Addis Abeba, the gap yawns widest for women who had run homebased enterprises, and for children who lost the safety of many watchful adults. Alienation, scholars say, is harder to fix than plumbing.

Paper results still glittered. By 2014, deliveries had surpassed 170,000 units, and officials proclaimed that the slum footprint had been halved. Followup surveys painted another picture. Incomes fell, transport bills climbed, and promised utilities lagged behind occupancy. Infrastructure arrived without a pulse.

Old neighbourhoods thrived on informal safety nets. Where banks did not, "Idir" and "iqub" groups offered insurance, savings and credit. Children walked to school, watched by many eyes. Meals crossed thresholds with ease. Development scholar Caroline Moser’s vulnerability framework reminds us that intangible assets, such as social ties, local knowledge, and trust, can outweigh concrete ones. In innercity Addis Abeba, they were abundant until bulldozers treated them as debris.

The loss of this grit is almost never priced. Planners count hectares cleared, but not grandmothers who watched the alley. They value reinforced concrete but not the whispered favour that found a first job. By chasing measurable outputs, policy swapped poverty relief for slum removal, conjuring new hardship.

No one argues against better housing. Few would mourn the exit of leaking tin roofs or unpaved walkways that doubled as open drains. But 'better' should mean more than mere concrete. Better should be responsive, participatory, and adaptable. The IHDP succeeded in building houses. It failed in building homes.

Cities cannot afford to chase visibility for another decade at the expense of viability. Incremental in-situ upgrades, serviced land plots, and credit for self-builds would stretch public funds and preserve social cohesion. Development should embrace what one planner called “the disorder that shelters dignity” instead of erasing it. Redevelopment should not stop; it should start differently. Begin with what works.

How do homes sustain life as it is, not only as planners hope?

Mixed-use, mixed-income designs and incremental upgrades can transform top-down orders into bottom-up evolution. Residents should be considered not merely as recipients but as experts of their streets. A city’s greatness will be judged less by tower heights than by how well it held its people together when the scaffolding was gone.

PUBLISHED ON Jul 19,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1316]