Addis Ababa Bole Road, Mexico, Sarbet, Qera at night. Ethiopia, Africa, the New look of Addis Ababa.

Addis Ababa: ‘New Flower’ in an Old Vase

By Biruk Terrefe, PhD Candidate, University of Oxford

Nowhere is the concept of ‘path-dependence’ – the idea that a set of outstanding decisions are constrained by decisions made in the past – more tangible than in the urban bricolage that has emerged in Addis Ababa over the last fifty years. Addis Ababa’s façade blends across time and space, ranging from the century-old Imperial palaces and Italian modern architecture of the 1930s, to Soviet-influenced office buildings as well as the Chinese-backed Light-Rail transit system and skyscrapers.

The Urban Age Conference in 2018 hosted at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa provided a platform not only to engage with international academics and current and former mayors from across the world, but also offered the space for much-needed internal reflection among Ethiopia’s urban thinkers.

Ethiopia has had the highest expenditure rate on infrastructure in Africa, investing heavily in road networks, railways, dams, and housing.[i] While this has contributed to the rapid economic growth of the country in the last decade, it has also led to the demise of central tenets of urban planning. New roads and a city-wide rail system have been planned, built and constructed on the basis of engineering principles, where questions of social integration and connectivity with existing systems were of secondary importance. It is important to remember that roads are built for cars, streets, on the other hand, are built to maintain the vibrant interactions between vendors, pedestrians, shop owners, and vehicles. Unfortunately, Addis Ababa has lost sight of this vital distinction.