Nicole Baron

This dissertation describes the urban actors and spatial practices that contribute to natural urban resilience in Addis Ababa’s inner city. Natural urban resilience is a non-strategical and bottom-up, everyday form of general urban resilience – an urban system’s ability to maintain its essential characteristics under any change. This study gains significance by exposing conceptual gaps in the current un-derstanding of general urban resilience and highlighting its unconvincing applicability to African cities. This study attains further relevance by highlighting the danger of the ongoing large-scale redevelopment of the inner city. The inner city has naturally formed, and its urban memory, spaces, and social cohesion contribute to its primarily low-income population’s resilience. This thesis argues that the inner city’s demolition poses an incalculable risk of maladaptation to future stresses and shocks for Addis Ababa. The city needs a balanced urban discourse that highlights the inner city’s qualities and suggests feasible urban transformation measures. “Natural Urban Resilience” contributes an empirical study to the debate by identifying those aspects of the inner city that contribute to general resilience and identifies feasible action areas. This study develops a qualitative research design for a single case study in Addis Ababa. The data is obtained through expert interviews, interviews with resi-dents, and the analysis of street scene photos, which are abstracted using Grounded Theory. That way, this thesis provides first-time knowledge about who and what generates urban resilience in the inner city of Addis Ababa and how. Furthermore, the study complements existing theories on general urban resilience. It provides a detailed understanding of the change mechanisms in resilience, of which it identifies four: adaptation, upgrading, mitigation, and resistance. It also adapts the adaptive cycle, a widely used concept in resilience thinking, conceptually for urban environments. The study concludes that the inner city’s continued redevelopment poses an incalculable threat to the entire city. Therefore, “Natural urban resilience” recommends carefully weighing any intervention in the inner city to promote Addis Ababa’s overall resilience. This dissertation proposes a pattern language for natural urban resilience to support these efforts and to translate the model of natural urban resilience into practice.

Zusammenfassung: Globale Entwicklungsagenden fordern die Beteiligung der Zivilgesellschaft an der Umsetzung nachhaltiger Stadtentwicklung, aber es ist wenig darüber bekannt, wie diese Forderung im Lichte afrikanischer städtischer Realitäten umgesetzt wird. Dieser Artikel untersucht dieses Thema am Beispiel der "Iddir" in Addis Abeba, Äthiopien. Die Iddir sind von Bürger*innen getragene Nachbarschafts-und Begräbnisvereine. Sie unterstützen ihre Mitglieder im Trauerfall, dienen aber auch als informelle Krankenversicherungen und lokale Entwicklungsgruppen. Allein in der äthiopischen Hauptstadt gibt es über 7.800 von ihnen. Das Wissen über ihre aktuelle Rolle in der Stadt-und Quartiersentwicklung ist jedoch lückenhaft und spiegelt den viel diskutierten Mangel an wissenschaftlichen Daten und Theorien aus dem globalen Süden wider. Der vorliegende Artikel gibt einen Einblick in die vorhandene Literatur zu Iddir in der Stadt-und Quartiersentwicklung und beleuchtet Kooperationsformen mit kommunalen Akteur*innen in Addis Abeba. Gegenwärtig gibt es ein wachsendes Interesse an der Erforschung der Interaktion von Zivilgesellschaft und Staat in der afrikanischen Stadt, um Wissenslücken in Bezug auf städtische Governance und die Entwicklung afrikanischer Städte zu schließen und globale Agenden angesichts der Realitäten afrikanischer Städte zu relativieren.

This paper presents initial findings from the empirical analysis of community-based social enterprise (SE) and non-profit organisation (NPO) ecosystems in Johannesburg. SEs and NPOs are widely recognised as contributors to the resilience of marginalised urban communities. However, the connection between these organisations, urban governance, and community resilience has not yet been sufficiently understood, particularly in African urban contexts. The 'Resilient Urban Communities' project focuses on Johannesburg as a case study to shed light on this under-researched topic. The key to exploring it is understanding SEs and NPOs as providers of public services, job creators, and promoters of good governance, all of which contribute to community resilience. Using this premise as a starting point, this paper investigates ecosystem conditions with a particular focus on state-civil society partnerships. Empirical data was generated through semi-structured interviews and analysed with a grounded theory approach. Preliminary results of this ongoing research reveal that urban geography is a relevant ecosystem factor for SEs and NPOs from marginalised communities. We also suggest that co-production could be an opportunity for growth within the investigated statecivil society partnership.

“Appropriateness is a moving target” was the name of an article written by Dirk Hebel, then direc- tor of the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction, and City Development in 2010. What he meant with this was the ambiguity of deciding what would be good architecture in Ethio- pia, a land-locked country at the Horn of Africa, with nothing but an ever-growing human capital to support a booming construction sector. Consequently, we used this research to find out what would happen if we directed this question towards the term “sustainable building” in the context of Sub-Sahara Africa. Is this standard, which was established in the developed world, appropriate in the context of contemporary Ethiopia? How can we explore and present this issue in a way that it represents the Ethiopian reality and not our perception of it as Western foreigners?
With the help of this paper, we intend to give answers to these complex questions. The goal was to discover the reality of “sustainable building” in the capital Addis Ababa. Subsequently, new ideas on how to achieve the goals of sustainability could be developed.
Two texts from Ethiopia – one scientific, the other one commercial – and two interviews with con- struction practitioners unfold a web of cultural, educational, economic, political, construction, func- tional, aesthetic, and historic layers which influence the implementation of and the critical discus- sion on “sustainable building” in Ethiopia. Carefully listening to this Ethiopian discourse, our paper critically reflects the appropriateness of “our” (i.e. Western) understanding of sustainability. Listening to the story unfolding through our case studies, we found that there is awareness about the concept of sustainability, but that it is not implemented “correctly”. Either it is completely ne- glected due to budget constraints, lack of alternative building materials, or knowledge or it is re- duced to the issue of sustainable resource management, such as material use, renewable energy, recycling, etc. Urban design, socio-cultural aspects, or adaptability are neglected.
Referring to the idea that appropriateness depends on the availability of alternatives, we conclude that “sustainable building” as “we” know it is not appropriate in contemporary Addis Ababa. This lack of appropriateness is why it is “sustainable building” is not being implemented at the moment. What, then, can be done to implement sustainability goals in Ethiopia? One chance certainly lies in Ethiopia appropriating the concept of “sustainable building” for herself instead of wasting re- sources on trying to “enforce” a foreign concept through tools that are not appropriate for the con- text. This would require an honest discourse amongst Ethiopian building professionals and intel- lectuals.

If appropriating “sustainable building” is one option, changing the toolbox could be another option to reach good architecture. We suggest to work with urban resilience as a concept that is more responsive to the local context, more flexible, and more adaptable. Urban resilience is the poten- tial of an urban system to adapt to and learn from changes while retaining its basic functions. If the goals of improving human life, replacing resources used, and preserving the ecosystem remain but the toolbox becomes more flexible and adaptive, we might as well achieve a more satisfying result. We claim that resilience as opposed to “sustainable building” is much better suited to achieve a construction economy in Ethiopia that serves its society and environment rather than exploiting it. Firstly, because of its novelty and great potential for appropriation. Secondly, be- cause the core values of resilience are change and creativity, both of which are qualities that can without a question be attributed to Ethiopia’s urban spaces.
The way, in which this research was conducted and presented as well as its consequent focus on the practical application of sustainable building in Ethiopia has not been attempted before. We therefore hope that we can contribute to a much-needed professional discourse in Ethiopia on sustainable building and a just as much much-needed global discourse on creating appropriate standards on what good building in developing countries means.

Resilience has recently attracted widespread interest in the field of urban planning and theory. However, the research that has been conducted on urban resilience in Africa has major theoretical and methodological gaps. This can lead to problems when designing and implementing resilience strategies there. Understanding African perspectives can be a way of tackling these. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Using the example of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper analyses expert interviews based on a grounded theory approach. The goal is to explore locally specific perceptions of and pathways to urban resilience. By comparing these findings to those reported in the existing literature, differences and overlaps are identified. This study provides evidence for the existence of locally specific perceptions of and pathways to urban resilience. Furthermore, it identifies urban development pathways such as complete urban makeover (tabula rasa) and complete negation of change (resistance). Because this study uses Addis Ababa as a singular case and expert interviews as method, it rather represents an initial attempt at exploring a new research field than claiming generalisability. Its quality and significance lie in its discursive approach and theory formation. This exemplary study from Ethiopia demonstrates that a regionally specific understanding of urban resilience is valuable for the design and implementation of urban resilience strategies. This study offers unique insights into urban resilience from an African perspective and into the manifestation of urban resilience in Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia is one of the fastest urbanizing countries in the world with a government urgently struggling to find coping strategies for a rapidly growing urban population. Eighty percent of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, is by convention considered “slum” with problems of overcrowding, bad sanitation, and dilapidated housing. Concurrently, Addis Ababa offers a unique insight into a indigenous urban tissue which was not shaped by colonization and modernist city models but by its own history and culture. In order to address the housing question, the Ethiopian government set up a mass housing program aiming to replace all informal housing but leaving the urban poor behind.

Drawing upon literatures from Ethiopia and the world as well as from several disciplines, this paper reflects the ten-year running Ethiopian mass housing program against the background of the Addis Ababa’s housing crisis. The author argues that the indigenous urban tissue of Addis Ababa is key to developing future housing schemes that are not only relevant but also resilient.

The paper closes with a short description of how a design approach might look like that promotes Addis Ababa’s indigenous urban tissue and therefore its urban resilience.