This dissertation explores the political geographies of urban restructuring through a case study of planners advancing urban renewal programs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I build an account of the work lives of these public servants on the basis of data from interviews, participant observation, and unobtrusive study of planning and policy documents. Amid rapid urbanization, I show that Ethiopian legacies of high modern development are gaining new expression in the EPRDF's agenda of infrastructure-led development. Urban renewal was tentatively tried in Addis Ababa in the 1980s. But by the time of the master planning round begun in 2012, renewal had become the signature intervention of massive redevelopment of the city. Slum spaces have become the proving grounds for planners as key agents of urban governance. By drawing together insights from Marxist urban studies, socio-legal studies, and recent literature on African urbanisms, the dissertation refines scholarly understandings of the dynamic relations between governance and development in (East) African cities. Urban renewal is not reducible to a local variant on the familiar story of capitalist enclosure, and the slum is not just a space of immiseration beyond the reach of regulation. Instead, the dissertation shows that as planners draw a line against development failures of previous regimes, they furnish the local state with legitimation for its deepening involvement in everyday life. At the nexus of rapid urbanization, new flows of capital, and the bold visions of this resurgent developmental state, planners see themselves engaged in a historic project to realize better urban futures through renewal. Some even see in the current moment a more egalitarian planning praxis to come, including upgrading as an alternative to urban renewal. However, though the specialist knowledge of planners points to the potential for new and more inclusive planning paradigms, such a vision has yet to overcome the hegemony of party politics.