Unjust Developments

Marco Di Nunzio is Associate Professor in Urban Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The Act of Living (Cornell University Press, 2019) and the director of the documentary A Day in Arada. Marco is also the founding editor of OtherwiseMag, a magazine of ethnographic storytelling.

"This book is an outstanding achievement. It makes a major contribution to knowledge on the dynamics driving urban change and redevelopment in cities of the Global South. It does this by focusing on the author’s long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and draws on his observations, experience, and ethnography in the city over 12 years or so, when the city was at the height of a construction boom." - Claire Mercer, Professor of Human Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author of The Suburban Frontier: Middle Class Construction in Dar es Salaam "This is an important and singular work in urban studies. While there are many books on urban infrastructure and the political economy of the built environment, Di Nunzio’s manuscript covers the different modalities, actors, scales, and narratives of a construction boom in an African city, which represents something unprecedented in African urban history. The event and the analysis is well matched in terms of their singularity." - AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the University of Sheffield and author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture "A timely and meticulous ethnographic account that reveals how urban development repeatedly fails the urban poor and how injustice is constructed, challenging narratives of inevitability. A must-read for scholars and practitioners committed to more just urban futures." - Biruk Terrefe, Lecturer in African Politics at the University of Bayreuth "Di Nunzio draws on his deep knowledge of Addis Ababa to provide a brilliant analysis of the ways in which urban development capitalizes on visions of prosperous futures while continuing to delimit entitlements to the city. A kaleidoscope of voices – of inner-city evictees, homeowners, construction workers, planners, government officials, and others – shine clearly through the text, providing an empathetic, ground-up view that elucidates a key paradox: how does avowedly inclusionary, state-driven urban development further marginalize the poor? Di Nunzio’s attention to the morality of urban development and the politics of entitlements provides timely insights for policy makers and scholars alike." - Llerena Guiu Searle, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester and author of Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India

• Acronyms and Amharic Terms viiPseudonyms ixIntroduction 11 The Morality of Creative Destruction 372 The Burden of a Home 653 Work Is for Poor People 904 A Responsibility to Build 1175 Seeing Like a Developer 1396 Giving the Market a Spatial Feel 1587 Not My Job 184Epilogue: The Future That Was 204Acknowledgments 225Notes 229Works Cited 233Index 261