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Urban Laboratory – Addis Ababa
Actor networks in sustainable urban and rural transformation
The Urban Laboratory – Addis Ababa is as multifaceted as
the assemblage of people that has contributed to its genesis.
As many endeavors, it all began with a dinner. Franz
Oswald, our colleague and guest, had just returned from
Ethiopia and recalled with excitement what he had seen
and experienced. He talked of places and people, not unlike
Marco Polo’s narration in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities,
that set to coalesce into a montage of fragmentary images:
the roof of Africa, the “new flower” of Addis, the Queen of
Sheba, Emperor Menelik II, and so forth. But he also addressed
the conditions that frame current developments in
Ethiopia: widespread poverty, the AIDS epidemic, insufficient
sanitation, contested elections, migration from rural
to urban regions, and the increased role of China in Africa.
Little did we know that this would be just the beginning of
myriad expeditions, not only into foreign terrains but also
into the very culture that we call our own.
Alternative project for affordable mass housing and urban
agriculture in Addis Ababa, combining pre-fabrication
and self-built construction (Sarah Graham 2009/2010)
Oswald, arguing for understanding the city as a collection
of intertwined networks, became the first actor in a complex
net of participants who temporarily joined forces to
form ad hoc groups linked by a common project. With this,
the Urban Laboratory – Addis Ababa was founded to address
questions pertaining to Ethiopia’s current urban and rural
transformation – a laboratory to combine expertise from a
range of fields, via research and integrated design processes,
in order to promote strategies for achieving sustainable
settlements. What began as a partnership linking faculty
and students from Addis Ababa University and the ETH Zurich
soon evolved into a network of collaborators that included
city officials, professionals, and local stakeholders, for
any potential change could only be initiated from within.
Here, urban design as a discipline became the central platform
in processes of mediation. The design propositions that
emerged from the research – whether pertaining to infrastructure
planning, to slum up-grading, or the formation of
new towns in rural territories – offered a base for dialogue,
a type of round-table for debates where ideas could be
bartered and conflicts possibly resolved. A recent exhibition
of the work in Addis Ababa combined with a series of workshops
took on the role of a participatory forum, with urban
design as an agent tracing connections between controversies,
unraveling disagreements, and setting potential courses
of action for Ethiopia’s urban and rural transformation –
urban design as a form of communicative action.
Marc Angélil and Dirk Hebel
Marc Angélil is Professor of Architecture and Design in the Network
City and Landscape (NSL) of the Department of Architecture of
the ETH Zurich. Dirk Hebel is Director of the Ethiopian Institute of
Architecture, Building Construction and City Development at Addis
Ababa University.
Their book Cities of Change Addis Ababa: Transformation Strategies
for Urban Territories in the 21 st Century has been published by Birkhäuser
Verlag in 2009.
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Research collaboration
Urban and rural transformation