Paper short abstract:

Since the beginning of the 1990s, large-scale urban renewal programme has been undertaken by the municipality of Addis Ababa to demolish areas of the city considered slums, resulting in a new redefinition of urban land and housing markets in the city.

Paper long abstract:

The article examines the expansion of the major urban renewal projects by the municipality of Addis Ababa to demolish slums in the inner city. Three principal arguments are advanced by the article. First, the urban renewal program carried out by the municipality is part of a major effort to remake the city as the "diplomatic capital of Africa". The underlying legal and institutional mechanism adopted by the municipality to impose a neoliberal governance structure was to extend market forces whereby the local government assumes an entrepreneurial role in partnership with private actors. Second, the large-scale urban renewal initiatives were directed to open up part of the city for highly profitable investments by a host of national and transnational actors to recapture the devalorization of older fixed capital to build office towers, leisure hotels, condominium development as well as shopping complexes. These urban policy strategies were designed to mobilize the urban space as an arena for market-oriented urban economic growth and as spaces for elite consumption practices. Finally, the paper will assess these developments and how the municipal authorities have negotiated with different stakeholders as well as how the inhabitants of the demolished areas have responded to the ongoing processes of urban transformation.