Skip to main content

Hone Mandefro Belaye:
My inspiration

A few multi-storied apartment buildings with sand-couloured walls dominate middle ground. Above the buildings, a blue sky with scattered fluffy white clouds. In the foreground, a woman wearing a white shawl walks across a cobblestone square towards the buildings. A picture of a condominium neighbourhood in Addis Ababa. Photo by Hone Mandefro Belaye.

How do residents of condominium houses describe their relationship with their new material, social and institutional environments?


In Addis Ababa, slums are being cleared out to make space for public funded condominium houses. The newly built condo neighbourhoods are distinct from typical neighbourhoods in Addis Ababa: very dense, in the periphery of the city and gated. In addition, the lottery system of distribution of units brings residents that are from different areas and unknown to each other. Witnessing this massive scale social and physical transformation motivated me to understand how and what aspect of life of the relocated people have changed and what does that tells us about the nature of urban change in Ethiopia.

© Concordia University