Since the mid-2000s, the Ethiopian government has been rolling out a condominium housing programme on an enormous scale, with the number of units now in the hundreds of thousands and a further 50,000 planned for construction annually in Addis Ababa alone. Many of the earliest clusters of condominiums were in central areas of the city, but increasingly these developments are mushrooming in the urban periphery, transforming the fringes of the city and feeding into a complex politics of land and new spatializations of socioeconomic difference. The condominium areas comprise several different schemes, from those that aim to house the poorest in society to those that are widely acknowledged as having been captured by the middle classes. Moreover, these varying forms of government-driven housing also exist side by side with luxury private real estate developments, informal settlements and displaced farming communities. This has resulted in highly diverse communities that share the same peripheral geography but highly differentiated levels of socio-economic exclusion and mobility. The presentation will discuss emerging findings from both quantitative survey and qualitative interview and solicited diary work in this complex and rapidly changing new urban geography. In exploring both the drivers and lived experiences of these constantly evolving peripheries, it analyses how they reflect the city’s broader political economy and the ways in which relates to the government’s effort to reshape urban territory and maintain political control.