Liveable and lively outskirts

Urbanisation is the one word that describes best what is currently happening in Africa. Addis Ababa is one of the fastest growing cities in Africa: the number of inhabitants is rising fast. More and more people from the countryside move to the capital. This puts a lot of pressure on the city and causes several problems. One of these problems is the shortage of affordable housing. People are struggling to find a place to live in humane conditions. The number of slum settlements is growing. In order to give people a place to live with improved living conditions, a new type of affordable housing is needed. In 2006 the Integrated Housing Development Program was launched to create more affordable housing (Keffa, 2014). Informal settlements are destroyed and replaced by condominiums. Also in the outskirts of the city areas are cleared from farms, villages and greenery to be replaced by condominiums, large apartment blocks. Large groups of people from the inner city are moved to these new areas, such as Yeka Abado and Legetafo Area. However, the condominium neighbourhoods raise questions and bring along new problems: they differ from the original compound and countryside structures. The system of the condominium neighbourhoods needs critical reflection and improvement. Program, basic infrastructure and human scale needs to be taken into account. To critically reflect and find methods to improve the current condominium neighbourhoods, research on several elements of both the condominium neighbourhoods and slum settlements is needed. The elements of research on the slum settlements will focus on ‘general’ aspects of slum settlements, while the research on the condominiums neighbourhoods will use Legetafo Area as a case study. Part of this research is comparing condominium neighbourhoods in the outskirts of the city with (successful) condominium neighbourhoods in the city centre and the original compound structure currently found in the slum settlements. Using the themes of boundaries, scale, proportion, proximity, density, social spaces, building technologies and income generation, will contribute in forming a design proposal. The design has been developed in trying to provide an alternative design within the condominium neighbourhoods to improve living conditions and create a good functioning and mixed neighbourhood that provides the base for a strong social structure.