Banks, Sweat and Shelter in Addis Ababa

In the 1970s and 1980s the politics of international development aid keenly promoted planned progressive development strategies as the primal method to produce affordable housing for the urban poor. Through this period, the World Bank used the so-called “sites and services” program to encourage staged development, flexibility, and the use of sweat equity in affordable housing production. This program aimed at providing security of tenure and a range of basic services to enable and encourage low-income households to improve their housing through time using self-help financing and/or construction.

In this paper, I aim at examining the nexus between design decisions and the performance of a site and services settlement through time. To contribute for the production of knowledge on this topic, I will analyse the Nefas Silk sites and services settlement, a World Bank-funded project with approximately 3500 serviced plots developed in Addis Ababa in the 1980s. Launched in the heyday of the Derg - the socialist regime that overthrew the emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 - the settlement survived many political, social, economic and demographic transformations through the last three decades. With such an eventful history, Nefas Silk provides an excellent case to analyse the performativity of the sites and services approach. With a critical account of the results of this analysis I will single out the potentials and the threats of reconceptualising the sites and services programme to develop new affordable housing policies and support design decision-making processes for all the stakeholders engaged in actively promoting sustainable development in the global urban south.