For more than a month now, a makeover project has been in full swing covering the heart of Addis Ababa. It is the latest and most extensive of a series of facelift projects the government has undertaken in the capital over the last few years.
This makeover is slated to encompass drainage, street lighting, and roadwork, and eventually high rises, business centers, and shopping malls, according to the Addis Ababa City Administration.
The aesthetic ambitions behind the ‘Addis Ababa Road Corridors Up-scaling and Upgrading Project’ has thus far seen widespread demolition in the capital, and the total razing to the ground of the historic city center of Piazza (known locally as Piassa)..
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The neighborhood’s well-trodden streets are unrecognizable, and its shacks, antique houses, and iconic buildings are no more.
People from far and wide in the city used to come to Arada (aka Piassa) to buy jewelry, to catch a show at one of its theaters and cinemas; go shopping for tailored suits, or a cup of coffee and some pastry at one of its many famous coffee shops. Memorable also was how the famous shops lining the streets displayed expensive gold and silver jewelries within easy reach, just behind glass windows. (It once was a segregated upscale area during the years of Italian occupation (1935 – 1941), leaving a market yonder south for the indigenous residents.
All that remains now are the memories of a once bustling neighborhood.
The City Administration says the project encompasses 41 kilometers of road, and tens of thousands of residents have already been relocated to the city’s peripheries to make way. It comes on the heels of a chain of similar projects under the stewardship of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
There is still no official indication of how much the modern parks, museum complexes, and other infrastructure projects have and continue to cost, nor is it clear where the financing is coming from.
Doro Maneqia, a more run down quarter of Piassa, was recently demolished to make the area congruent in standards with a state-of-the-art museum.
During a recent meeting and immediately following the demolition in the area, city officials including Mayor Adanech Abiebie reported to the Prime Minister about the progress of the corridor project. In his closing remarks, Abiy said the project would create infrastructural connections for all the high-end projects whose implementation he personally oversaw. According to him, a new upscale village would sprout in place of the areas cleared and that in turn would increase the value of plots of land nearby.
“Consider it a sacrifice you would have to make for your country and the growth of your city,” Abiy said during a meeting with the owners or property slated for partial or total demolition along the corridor project route.
The four kilometer road leading from razed Piassa to Shola market has been host to an army of bulldozers, excavators, dump trucks, and engineers, foremen, and laborers clad in safety gear working day and night.
Buildings along the route have seen their entryways and front steps torn down for street widening works. The outer walls of the British and Kenyan embassies on Comoros Street, however, remain untouched, as diplomatic tenets trump a project of this scale.
Recently published 3D renderings from the City Administration portray grand plans for Piassa and other parts of the city where officials are planning to lease plots to high-end developers. The rubble has all been cleared from Piassa and its environs, and so have 55,000 people who were forced to move elsewhere, according to the Mayor.
The Addis Ababa City’s Land Development and Administration Bureau has already announced the floating of 243 prime plots of land in all but one sub cities for lease to private high-end developers. The plots categorized as grades one and two are located at upscale areas of the city – areas that are complete with necessary infrastructure and found at, near to or easily accessible to the city center.
The plots whose lease have been floated – selection will open by May – include areas cleared by the ongoing Corridor development project.
Although the Mayor claims that residents have been relocated with fair compensation, many of those evicted are unsatisfied and criticize the initiative for the short notice given to vacate their homes.
“We were told to pack up and leave the area on short notice,” a 40-year-old woman who used to live in Piassa with her two children and nephew told The Reporter, speaking anonymously.
“The promise was that we would be given housing and also 150,000 birr per family as compensation. But when we evacuated, they told us to take 50,000 birr,” said the woman, who had resided in Piassa for over 30 years. “The housing they gave us does not have windows, running water or electricity – unfinished condominium units.”
Such complaints have not gone uncorroborated.
In a statement issued early April, the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO) said “not enough time had been given for the residents at the demolition sites, and the evacuees faced serious challenges as the relocation disrupted their daily work they do for a living and their children’s schooling.”
EHRCO said they toured and saw firsthand the demolition of houses, business buildings and other structures at various places at Woreda 10 of Arada Sub-city, in Piassa, Arat Killo, British Embassy, Kebena and Shola.
Over the last couple of months, the issue has made headlines across both the mainstream and social media platforms and the government maintains that the evacuees were adequately compensated for and were relocated to better dwellings, to areas healthy to be living in.
Michael Shiferraw, an architect and author, observes that such sweeping demolitions or any urban planning and implementation endeavor must have the convenience, security and health of people as a central consideration.
“However dilapidated and poor these areas appear to be, they embrace in their bosoms complex human relationships and interactions,” he said, adding demolishing neighborhoods destroys such interactions, uproots communities and associations such as Idir and Equb.
Michael argues that dilapidated neighborhoods could have been repaired and retained without the need for large-scale and costly relocation.
“In the first place, places such as Doro Maneqia in and around the city center had been there for long and they testify to the failures and corruption of successive governments,” said Michael.
Jacobs vs. Moses
The time immediately following WWII saw an architectural transformation in the city of New York. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the famous U.S. city grew to leaps and bounds with a thick crop of skyscrapers defining its most recognizable present day skyline.
Jane Jacobs was a sociologist and journalist by profession who presented a stern opposition at the time to the unfettered capitalistic trend of destroying the more humble settlements and the community interactions to make way for the speedy construction of skyscrapers.
“While Jacobs could not stop that trend necessitated by speedy wealth creation and accumulation, she at least saved some neighborhoods from vanishing totally through her advocacy upholding the interests of the people,” said Michael.
The growth of capitalism found its advocate in the person of a power broker at the time, Robert Moses, who was one of those at the forefront of the creation of New York as we know it today, a thick jungle of high rise buildings of concrete, steel and glass.
But the efforts of Jacobs were not in vain as the author of the 1961 defining work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” has influenced generations of architects who came after her.
According to Michael, any urban planning and implementation at any given period in time is the result of the ideology of the ruling party.
“EPRDF policy during the post–2005 period, for example, allowed for the construction of condominiums and industrial villages, and buoyed by the wealth that was beginning to be created,” he said.
Many of the condominium sites big and small that are in the inner city or across the suburbs of Addis Ababa were those launched during that period, an endeavor and trend that has been discouraged by the incumbent Prosperity Party.
“Today, it seems that we have no clear-cut housing policy, we can only see trends,” said Michael.
No Past, No Future
One of the controversies raised around the Corridor project is the handling of heritage sites, though the Addis Ababa City Administration denies allegations of negligence.
Michael argues that historical buildings and structures need to be retained as they speak volumes.
“You take your children for a walk along the famous Churchill road starting from La Gare area, the old railway terminal, up to Piassa, you come up on buildings that were constructed at various periods and you can walk your children through the histories of the last emperor, the militaristic Derg regime and the time of the EPRDF,” said Michael. “It is like reading a well written book, and who would enjoy reading any such book with its chapters missing?”
He likened the demolition of landmarks and famous buildings to the ripping out of chapters from a book.
Over the past four decades, the city of Addis Ababa – seat of the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) as well as other continental and regional organizations – has seen intermittent relocations of entire neighborhoods due to redevelopment plans.
Sheraton Addis sits on the remains of a dense slum once covering the Fit Ber and Filwuha areas. Another neighborhood was torn down to make way for the construction of a UNECA complex. Thousands of residents have also been displaced from the expanse of land that stretches from La Gare all the way down to the AU headquarters and beyond after the area was cordoned off for redevelopment by the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The list is long.
What differentiates the latest redevelopment effort from the past endeavors is its being expeditious and sweeping with an element of surprise.
“At any rate,” Michael said, “city upgrading or renewal works need to give due attention to maintaining continuity. If you don’t respect legacies from the past, you cannot be sure coming generations will respect yours.”
Michael likened a city without a past with a man who lost sense of memory.
“Cities can lose their abilities to remember or give remembrance to their past. And a man who completely forgets his past cannot function as a normal human being, and he has no future unless he heals. You can dress a man with fancy suits and expensive pairs of shoes, but if he is a man who completely lost sense of his past, does not memorize anything he just did, does not remember not even his name, then we can see there is little use for his fancy looks,” he said.
Gentrification? Land Use Justice
Many people also criticize the government for what they perceive is gentrification – a legal grab of prime property in the center for redevelopment by the wealthy, while the less fortunate are increasingly pushed out into the peripheries.
Michael observes the government is invoking the constitutional provision that ownership of land is within the realm of the people and the government.
“Had ownership been private, it would have been too costly for the government to do what it has been doing by way of inner city renewals and upgrades because it would have to pay lofty amounts in compensations for the owners,” said Michael.
But in an interview with the state owned TV station, Jantrar Abbay, Deputy Mayor of the Addis Ababa CIty Administration, denied gentrification to be the motive of the latest corridor project or any city planning projects that had been undertaken by the city administration over the past several months. He reiterated the government’s communication line saying the evictees had been given replacement houses much better livable than the shacks they used to live in.
“The government should work to provide equity in the use and the right to public spaces and strike the balance between preserving dwelling areas and the unquenchable private and corporate interests,” said Michael. “Whether you articulate your ideology or not, it shows in what you do as ideas are translated to projects on the ground. The government in this regard is the biggest influence, but big business interests can hugely influence the decision and approach of the government as well.”
While the arguments keep simmering, the unpredictability of upgrading and renewal projects being implemented at large scales at various quarters of the city of Addis Ababa are causing the public to become more apprehensive of the future.
And above all, the situation calls to question affordability and priority as the country as a whole is struggling with ever increasing inflation, debts to the tune of billions of dollars, and an economy burdened with internal wars and conflict.
