The world is increasingly urbanised. Especially in those countries that are in rapid development, the migration to the city is extreme. This is the case for Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Its population growth exceeds the number of newly built housing, and the housing
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The world is increasingly urbanised. Especially in those countries that are in rapid development, the migration to the city is extreme. This is the case for Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Its population growth exceeds the number of newly built housing, and the housing that exists is unfit for a majority of the urban population. People create their own solution and move to informal neighbourhoods: neighbourhoods where they build their own houses and earn their money on the streets.
While the conditions in the informal settlements are far from optimal, people can live their life and create their own opportunities. Somehow, they make a living that they cannot make in formal housing units: either due to the rent they cannot afford to pay, or due to the inability to earn an income in the way they do in the informal neighbourhood. In this way of living the life in the informal neighbourhoods, temporality plays an important role. People are versitale, can adapt to different situations, different circumstances. They can build up a process, starting something from scratch with the resilience to improve it, one step at the time. The streets are vital: pedestrian flows are economic opportunities. Converting any moment, any place into an opportunity that fits the situation the best: from a kitchen to a shop through the window, from a outdoor stall to an outdoor cooking spot, from a place of moving and travelling, to a place for gathering and meeting. Spaces can transform, dwellings can transform, adapt to circumstances, adapt to serve the opportunity that seems most succesful. It is this temporal element that makes them resilient.
But these people are also vulnerable. With the current neighbourhood conditions, a lack of good quality housing, a lack of a well patterned street-network, a lack of services and hygiene, a lack of legal ownership, the dangers are clearly visible: fire, flooding, eviction and disease are potential enemies, created by their living situation. These people, of which there are so many in a city like Addis Ababa, deserve a home that caters their needs, actively engages them to use their abilities to improve their neighbourhood with the right acces to services, streets, economic opportunties. How can we use the theme of temporality to create such dwellings?
In this project, a built environment is envisioned that combines the informal way of living (earning an income, having social relations), with a good quality of dwelling. It provides a framework in which people can built their dwellings tehmselves, keeping them affodable, and being able to constantly adapt the home to what they need most. It generates outside space as well as people flows on lower as well as higher levels to increase the economic opportunities for all of the people living in the area.
