Unjust Developments

Name: Unjust Developments
Price: 80.99 AUD
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ISBN: 9781531513566

Building Inequalities in Ethiopia's Capital

Marco Di Nunzio

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Paperback

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English

Fordham University Press
05 May 2026

Urban communities; Ethnic studies; Property & real estate; Urban & municipal planning

Series: Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies

Why does injustice often deepen during moments of rapid urban growth? And what does the pursuit of more just urban futures look like when the realization of alternatives seems impossible?

African cities have boomed over the last two decades. Large-scale infrastructure projects, high-rises, and real estate ventures have transformed urban landscapes. While urban poverty levels have declined, rising housing costs, stagnant wages, and forced evictions – twinned with political authoritarianism – have intensified precarity and injustice.

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in construction sites, design offices, and new developments, anthropologist Marco Di Nunzio narrates the tensions animating the urban transformation that has reshaped Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, beyond recognition.

Unjust Developments reminds us that city building in Addis Ababa, as elsewhere, is not only about economic accumulation. It is a moral project, rooted in the belief that modern infrastructure will generate opportunity and uplift the poor. These promises have often failed the poor. Commitments to infrastructure have given political leaders, investors, planners, developers, and architects the leverage to prioritize their own visions of development and dismiss demands for better wages and affordable housing as politically irrelevant or economically unviable. Government and corporate investments in the built environment have helped entrench unequal hierarchies of entitlement and rights.

Yet city building remains a fragile achievement. It is marked by struggles not only between developers and displaced communities, or companies and workers, but also among the city builders themselves. Demands for a more just city and frictions within the building industry open space for rearticulating what counts as political necessity, moral action, expertise, and the future of development.

In conversation with critical urbanism, anthropology, and moral philosophy, Unjust Developments offers a powerful account of city building as both a site of injustice and a terrain of struggle – where justice is not guaranteed, but persistently demanded.

By: Marco Di Nunzio
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 395g
ISBN: 9781531513566
ISBN 10: 1531513565
Series: Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 05 May 2026
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acronyms and Amharic Terms vii Pseudonyms ix Introduction 1 1 The Morality of Creative Destruction 37 2 The Burden of a Home 65 3 Work Is for Poor People 90 4 A Responsibility to Build 117 5 Seeing Like a Developer 139 6 Giving the Market a Spatial Feel 158 7 Not My Job 184 Epilogue: The Future That Was 204 Acknowledgments 225 Notes 229 Works Cited 233 Index 261

Marco Di Nunzio is Associate Professor in Urban Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of The Act of Living (Cornell University Press, 2019) and the director of the documentary A Day in Arada. Marco is also the founding editor of OtherwiseMag, a magazine of ethnographic storytelling.

Reviews for Unjust Developments: Building Inequalities in Ethiopia's Capital

""This book is an outstanding achievement. It makes a major contribution to knowledge on the dynamics driving urban change and redevelopment in cities of the Global South. It does this by focusing on the author’s long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and draws on his observations, experience, and ethnography in the city over 12 years or so, when the city was at the height of a construction boom."" - Claire Mercer, Professor of Human Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author of The Suburban Frontier: Middle Class Construction in Dar es Salaam ""This is an important and singular work in urban studies. While there are many books on urban infrastructure and the political economy of the built environment, Di Nunzio’s manuscript covers the different modalities, actors, scales, and narratives of a construction boom in an African city, which represents something unprecedented in African urban history. The event and the analysis is well matched in terms of their singularity."" - AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the University of Sheffield and author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture