It is projected by the United Nations that the population of Addis Ababa will increase to almost double the size as it has by the day today. Due to political, as well as geographical circumstances, there is very little vacant space left to accommodate this growth. To tackle this growth, the Ethiopian government established the Integrated Housing Development Project (IHDP), a large scale and top-down, mass housing project. Inherent to the design of the condominiums of the IHDP are problems, varying from imposing a new lifestyle which does not correspond to the current lifestyle of the new residents, to the allocation of current residents to other parts of the city and thereby breaking up their social and economic network. Alongside the formal developments of housing we see in Addis the rapid formation of informal settlements, commonly referred to as slums. This too causes problems. First of all, the living condition inside these informal settlements can be considered as poor. Second, it is a bad allocation of valuable and scarce resources like land, labour, materials and energy. However, they do offer urban conditions which is one of the primary reasons why people move the cities: the accessibility to high economic activity. The project proposed in this report tries to find a synthesis between these two developments by answering the following question: How can a large scale affordable and progressively built housing scheme, incorporate the needs of different social classes while accommodating and maintaining different kinds of (informal) economic urban activities and being at the same time adaptive to future social changes?
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This graphic novel is the result of a micro-ethnographic research to Kechene, a district of Addis Ababa. Using graphic techniques borrowed from the architecture discipline, this graphic novel aims at bringing together representations of everyday life in the Kechene sefer (neighbourhood), that show how human life shapes its environment and vice versa. This graphic novel not only represents the architectural qualities and spatial relationships, but also reveals the hidden narratives of ordinary stories.
The graphic novel is complemented with a research booklet, which includes some of the key research findings that support the narrative used in the graphic novel. The research booklet is structured as a series of commented images reporting the research methods and the analysis that lead to the elaboration of the graphic novel
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This research booklet brings together a selection of quantitative data (e.g. Demography, Economy, Climate) related with Ethiopia, in general, and Addis Ababa in particular. This booklet compiles data from different sources (e.g. bibliography, online databases, and statistical data). The data is processed using new visual outputs that allow a comparative analysis of the case study (Addis Ababa) with other geographical contexts. ... Read more