Addis Ababa Citichat 15 June 2001

CITICHAT 23/2001 - 15 June 2001


Addis Ababa

Believe it or not, this Citichat comes to you all the way from Addis Ababa.

I am spending a week in this, the capital city of Ethiopia where I am presenting a series of workshops on urban renewal and Improvement Districts as part of a process which is aimed at revising the 15 year old Master Plan for the city. Spending most of the time indoors, except for a brief tour of part of the city the day after I arrived, I haven’t really seen enough to give anything but the broadest of perceptions.

Ethiopia’s history dates back over 2 000 years but Addis Ababa itself is as young a city as Johannesburg, in fact founded three years after Jo’burg in 1889. Today it is a sprawling metropolis of huge contrasts and a population of between 3.5 and 4 million people. But back to Ethiopia. Historically known as the Abyssinian Empire it once covered a large part of the African continent and its trade reached into much of the world.

During the 20th century it was the only sub-Saharan country not to have been colonised and was held up as a beacon of hope and inspiration to many Africans who were fighting to remove colonial powers. It had an exceptionally strong economy and was perceived to have the potential to become the “bread basket” of Africa.

A Marxist military regime, over a seventeen year period which ended in 1991, totally destroyed the economy of the country – its current GDP per person at $110 is one of the lowest in the world. Since 1991, the focus of the new government has been to move from the Marxist command and control economy to that of a free market. The country appears to be highly complex and its new constitution provides for it to be subdivided on ethnic lines, thus there are 14 regions or ethnic subdivisions of which Addis Ababa, as both region and capital city, is the only one not established on ethnicity. Although there is one official language there are some 72 languages (not dialects) spoken in this country of 60 to 65 million people (its population second only to Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa). It has its own calendar, called the Ethiopian calendar, which is some eight years behind the generally used calendar (it is now 1993) and which has twelve months of 30 days each and one month of five days!

First impressions. The airport, Bole International, is being rebuilt at a cost of $200 million (airports throughout the world appear to be in a constant state of extension or reconstruction!) and will obviously be an impressive gateway to the city when it is completed. On leaving the airport, however, one immediately gets onto one of the worst roads imaginable alongside the massive elevated section of a ring road under construction which is expected to make city commuting more efficient. The road has more potholes than driving surface so that every vehicle, in both directions, navigates from one side of the road to the other. Add wandering cows and goats and laden donkeys and this is one place where you don’t want to be behind the wheel! The city appears to be an amalgam of numerous settlements with high rise modern buildings of indeterminate architectural style randomly rising out of extensive high density shackland. The new $400 million hotel, the Sheraton Addis, is in sharp contrast to the corrugated iron shack neighbourhood on the other side of the street. My biggest disappointment is in fact in the architecture. I had been led to believe that, because it was a city not ever greatly influenced by colonial powers, it provided an example of true African city architecture. Not so, or hopefully, not so far!

The area that I saw most of on my second day here, is Merkato. Its origins date back to the short occupation of Ethiopia by Italy in the second world war, the Italians having designated this area of some 200 hectares for commercial activities of “indigenous peoples”. It has a population of between 95 and 100 000 people and is a dense, dense retail area, residential only accounting for less than 9%. Merkato is a major trading centre accommodating 14 000 formal businesses. It is the focal point for receiving all the country’s produce in bulk then redistributing it in a large variety of smaller quantities. It is also clearly the focal point for the ‘dumping’ of every variety of counterfeit designer goods.

Merkato’s commercial area is sub-divided into trading sectors so that one has all clothing related shops concentrated in one area, building materials in another, produce in another, etc. The streets that criss-cross Merkato are jammed, and I mean jammed, with cars, combi-taxis, trucks, donkeys and thousands and thousands of people who appear to prefer the roads to the pavements. In fact as one progresses outwards from the formal retail shop one encounters pavement (usually unpaved and solid with informal traders), parked vehicles and then another row of informal traders sitting and beggars sleeping on the road in the shade of the parked vehicles and then streams of pedestrians brushing cheek by jowl with or dodging between the traffic. To the uninitiated is appears chaotic but the skill the international group of architects from the Bau Haus, who are responsible for the urban upgrade design on behalf of city government, will have to bring will be in capturing the intense activity and vitality of the area. Many ‘shops’ of less than 20 square metres are sublet to 8 to 10 traders, all selling the same goods! Cheek by jowl will forever have an entirely different connotation for me! But it is really exciting!

And crime? Even with a 60% unemployment rate in the city, crime is minimal. In the crush of humanity that characterises the streets I never once felt threatened. My local mentor frequently used her cell phone while walking the area, as do many others, and I asked her if I would be safe on my own at night in the city with a camera in my hand. No problem! Makes you think!