Urban Land, State Power, and the Politics of the Skyline: What Dubai and Addis Ababa Have in Common

David Harvey’s idea of accumulation by dispossession shows how capital grows not by producing new value so much as by seizing something that already is there, land, water, and converting it into an assent that can be bought, leveraged, and sold. Cities are one of the clearest places this happens, because urban land is finite and the price of it depends on what gets built around it and who is allowed to invest in it.Dubai is close to a pure version of this. Most of its most valuable land didn’t exist a generation ago, it was reclaimed from the sea, or it was an empty desert until a ruler-owned developer decided to put a marina, an artificial island, or downtown there. This land was manufactured, allocated from the start to investors and buyers, most of them foreign. Addis Ababa’s version rhymes rather than repeats. The land in Ethiopia is constitutionally state-owned, which in theory should guard against speculation, but in reality hands the state total discretion over who gets a lease and on which terms. Once a masterplan decides a neighbourhood sits on valuable land, near a main road or an investment corridor, it is possible for it to be reallocated and the people living there rarely hold a claim strong enough to stop it. 

Who pays for the viewThe cost of this type of growth doesn't land evenly, and they rarely show up in the renderings. In Addis, the corridor development project, widening roads and cutting green medians throughout the city has meant clearing entire blocks of older, informal housing and small businesses that had traded there from the same spot for decades. Some residents received compensation, but many never held the formal tenure needed to claim the compensation. Walking through parts of the city such as Piassa and Kazanchis on recent trips back, streets I remember are simply gone, replaced by open ground waiting for developments that don’t exist yet.

The Dubai version of this cost is less visible, mostly because its urban poor were never able to live centrally to begin with. The people who have built and now maintain the skylines, labourers, usually live in accommodation further away from the city center. The centre is usually being reserved for whoever can pay for it, and everyone else is priced out of the view.  

Capital draws the blueprint

Foreign capital does not only fund urban development it decides the shape of it. Dubai’s skyline was designed to be photographed with recognisable towers and artificial islands visible from space, buildings that work as billboards for the emirate’s investment case. This aesthetic exists because free-zone rules and ownership laws were written to attract exactly that sort of capital, fast, mobile and more interested in prestige assets than in housing supply. Addis is now reaching for its own version of the same model. Officials are describing the city’s transformation in language that directly draws on Gulf comparisons, and Chinese and Gulf-linked financing has shaped what gets built in the city, ring roads, light rail, hotel towers and convention centres. These developments are the assets that read well to an investor sizing up the city from an outside point of view, not obviously the same list as a resident would draw up if asked what the city needed most.