Addis Ababa: extracting character from voids
Intoduction
When you move through the streets of Addis Ababa in 2011 you are flanked by iron metal sheets painted in green and yellow stripes. These sheets became lately an omnipresent companion in the city and fence the areas of major urban renewal projects. This reminds one of a tabula rasa ideology, proposed by the modern movement in the beginning of the 20th century in Europe. But Addis Ababa is not a playfield of ideologies, it is simply facing the question of how to handle large areas in the central part of the city, which are mostly single story developments and defined as “no-or low-income” residential areas, or simply: slums. When Menelik II founded Addis Ababa in 1886, he asked the chiefs and their entourage who helped him to win victory over the Italian occupation to settle around the emperors palace (the “Gebbi”), so he could continue to be in control of them. These small neighborhoods, called “sefer” became the motor for the development of the city. First, the “sefers” were separated by natural buffer zones as rivers, slopes or streams, but during the years, those boundaries blurred more and more due to the incredible speed of urban growth. Nevertheless, those first settlement areas stayed for the last 125 years almost as natural preserved social communities, with people and families living up till today in a very close economic and social relationship to each other. They can be seen as micro-cities in a larger urban network. The areas are marking and occupying most of the inner city, but do not correspond to the City Administration plans of density, sanitation, safety or public accessibility.