Urban Land Monetization-Driven Land Use Orientations: An Insight from Land Lease Prices in Addis Ababa

Amanuel Weldegebriel, Engdawork Assefa, Meron Tekalign and Anton Van Rompaey
Additional contact information
Amanuel Weldegebriel: Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E-2411, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
Engdawork Assefa: Center for Environment and Development, College of Development Studies, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa P.O. Box 1176, Ethiopia
Meron Tekalign: Center for Environmental Sciences, College of Natural and Computational Sciences, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa P.O. Box 1176, Ethiopia
Anton Van Rompaey: Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200E-2411, 3001 Leuven, Belgium

Land, 2022, vol. 11, issue 6, 1-21

Abstract: Urban land leasing is a land monetization strategy that was introduced in 1991 by the contemporary regime. Since then, urban center slum demolitions and their replacement by high-end commercial buildings and urban peripheral low-cost residential condominium expansions have been common occurrences in Addis Ababa. Land rentiers quote extreme land prices at the city center and relatively low prices towards the periphery. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that urban land supply and land prices are determinant factors for urban land use orientations, which have pushed low-end groups towards the periphery. Therefore, based on a lens of land rent theory, 1524 land lease prices and 1038 randomly selected land parcels using Google Earth were used to evaluate locational trends in land prices and land use orientations, respectively. This study revealed that there are significant variabilities between government benchmark land prices and actual quoted land prices. Because of the high rent gaps at the city center, significant land price quotations were recorded, and this overlaps with the urban center slum demolitions and slum resident resettlements at low-cost residential condominiums in the urban periphery. In the first 5 km from the urban economic center, land prices show a declining trend towards the periphery. The central business district is dominated by slums partially under demolition and high-end commercial buildings, while the periphery is dominated by high-rise low-cost residential condominiums. Therefore, the distance from the city center was found to be an explanatory factor of urban land prices. The contributions of other urban utilities to land prices, such as access to transportation routes, could be a future research area.

Keywords: urbanization; land rent; urban land monetization; land lease; urban land use; Ethiopia; Addis Ababa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/11/6/796/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/11/6/796/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:11:y:2022:i:6:p:796-:d:826161

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().