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Reconstructing Dwelling

Social and spatial features of housing practices in Addis Ababa

Doctoral Thesis (2025)
Author(s)

B.T. Haileselassie (TU Delft - Public Building and Housing Design)

Contributor(s)

DE van Gameren – Promotor (TU Delft - Architecture)

H.M. (Henk) Jonkers – Promotor (TU Delft - Materials- Mechanics- Management & Design)

N.J. Amorim Mota – Copromotor (TU Delft - Public Building and Housing Design)

Research Group
Public Building and Housing Design
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.71690/abe.2025.03
More Info
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Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Research Group
Public Building and Housing Design
Bibliographical Note
Brook Teklehaimanot Haileselassie is an architect and scholar based at the TU Delft. He completed his postgraduate studies at ETH Zurich, focusing on Urban Transformations in Developing Territories. Alongside his teaching and research roles at EiABC, Brook contributed to developing several teaching materials, including the publication Making in 2014. He has taught and lectured on design and urbanism at various universities and institutions and served as a guest lecturer and researcher at TU Delft’s Global Housing Studio in 2015. Balancing academic and professional work, Brook has worked and consulted at Universal Consultants (Ethiopia), Studio Other Spaces (Germany) and Greystone Developments (USA). Brook founded the architectural design firm BOTA Architectoch in Ethiopia in 2015, winning design competition awards and commissions. His photographic works have been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition South of the Sahara: Accelerated Urbanism in Africa. As an architect of record, he has designed several complex projects, such as the Addis Africa International Exhibition and Convention Centre. He has designed and overseen the completion of several housing projects in Addis Ababa and other cities within Ethiopia. He served as the project architect for the SICU, a housing prototype collaboratively built with faculty and students, which earned a bronze award in the 2014 Holcim Awards.@en
ISBN (print)
978-94-6384-737-7
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Abstract

Addis Ababa is experiencing a high rate of urbanization coupled with a decades-old housing crisis. This study problematizes the current housing problem not only in the frame of housing shortage but also as a ‘housing mismatch’, with the underlying dwelling typologies rooted in modernist design ideals not responding to context. These dwelling solutions, as seen in the recent condominium projects, do not fulfil the social and spatial requirements of dwellers. This problem calls for a thorough inquiry into tracing the roots of the ‘housing mismatch’. Since dweller-initiated housing transformations are a common phenomenon in most housing conditions in Addis Ababa, the study proceeded to analyze these transformations to understand the housing mismatch in its qualitative and spatial aspects. One of the reasons for dweller-initiated transformations is to finetune living habitats to cultural parameters. In line with this, transformations were observed during the test run of the fieldwork conducted on three households in 2020. Furthermore, the fieldwork revealed that dwellers used local conceptions of space such as the gibi, the gwaro and the gwada to explain the socio-spatial phenomena of transformations....