Unjust developments

Research Lead: Marco Di Nunzio

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in construction sites, design offices, and new developments, anthropologist this project narrates the tensions animating the urban transformation that has reshaped Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, beyond recognition.

Unjust Developments, now a forthcoming book with Fordham University Press, shows that city building in Addis Ababa, as elsewhere, is not only about economic accumulation. It is a moral project, rooted in the belief that modern infrastructure will generate opportunity and uplift the poor. These promises have often failed the poor. Commitments to infrastructure have given political leaders, investors, planners, developers and architects the leverage to prioritize their own visions of development and dismiss demands for better wages and affordable housing as politically irrelevant or economically unviable. Government and corporate investments in the built environment have helped entrench unequal hierarchies of entitlement and rights.

Yet city building remains a fragile achievement. It is marked by struggles not only between developers and displaced communities, or companies and workers, but also among the city builders themselves. Demands for a more just city and frictions within the building industry open space for rearticulating what counts as political necessity, moral action, expertise, and the future of development.

Research for this project was funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), the Foundation Wiener Anspach, LSE Cities and the Leverhulme Trust.