This project seeks for an alternative low-cost housing strategy for the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Currently, the condominium housing scheme is implemented everywhere throughout the city. Despite the impressive amount of newly constructed dwelling units, shortcomings of this housing strategy have drastic consequences within the social and environmental domain. It disperses communities, is not inclusive for the very poor and does not respond to environmental issues. This while the natural environment, and in particular the waterbodies of the city, is already under great pressure after years of uncontrolled urban sprawl. It has led to massive decline of urban green spaces and extremely polluted rivers having a huge negative impact on the liveability of the city. Therefore, this graduation report presents a design proposal that tries to reconnect the inhabitants with the waterbodies of the city in order to create a river culture. The vision of a river culture is the guiding principle throughout the whole design and emerges on all different scales. It connects the water linked ecosystem with the urban fabric and ensures that the waterbodies once again play a vital role within the environmental, social, economic and technical domain. In this way it is interwoven in the daily patterns of life of Addis Ababa’s inhabitants. Blurring the boundaries between people and nature, and thereby contributing to a synergetic environment between the urban dwellers and the rivers of the city.

This research booklet brings together a selection of data and spatial analysis of Ethiopia’s and Addis Ababa’s urban transformation. This booklet uses historical maps, new maps and a selection of bibliographic references, to produce a wide range of graphic outputs that trace the urban transformation of Addis Ababa in seven stages, from its foundation (c. 1887) until the current process of urbanisation under the auspices of globalization.

This graphic novel is the result of a micro-ethnographic research to Mickeyleland, a neighbourhood of Addis Ababa. Using graphic techniques borrowed from the architecture discipline, this graphic novel aims at bringing together representations of everyday life in the Mickeyleland 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.