Addis Ababa Urbanism: Indigenous Urban Legacies and Contemporary Challenges

Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, has been experiencing rapid urbanization as the entire country has transformed into an emerging market economy featuring a spectacular average ten percent GDP growth rate over the last ten years. However, this economic growth has not provided a poverty elimination momentum for the city where over half of its residents still live in slum areas and over thirty percent are unemployed or involved in informal economic activity. This paper examines the factors behind Addis Ababa’s inhibited urban progress focusing on urban legacies stemming from the city’s one-hundred-thirty years of independent development as well as on the present-day economic challenges. The empirical evidence suggests that there is a correlation between Addis Ababa’s inadequate investment in urban housing and infrastructure and Ethiopia’s low levels of foreign direct investment. Further analysis indicates that the country’s service-driven growth model of development may be contributing to overurbanization and poverty production in Addis Ababa.


Defining the Problem
Addis Ababa, the tenth largest city in Africa, is the capital of Ethiopia, the country that has never been colonized. It is a city of immeasurable contrasts in wealth and poverty, splendor and scarcity. It is home to Addis Ababa University, museums, churches, foreign embassies, and the super-modern building of the African Union Headquarters. On the other hand, it is an embodiment of the country where an average citizen earns $600 per year, over fifty percent of urban residents live in slums, and only fifteen percent of the roads are paved. The abundance of women and children begging in the streets is an eye-catching attribute of the Addis Ababa cityscape, contrasting to the magnificent churches and embassy campuses. While most of the existing scholarship on African urbanization and urban processes is concerned with the consequences of colonialism and post-colonial past-dependent development, Addis Ababa represents an interesting case of non-colonial urbanism. Therefore, the issue in focus is identifying the roots of factors responsible for the convergence of urban attributes manifested by both post-colonial and independently-developing African cities. Addis Ababa serves as an applicable case study for the latter cause.
expectations (Roy, 2009, 823). While on the surface most urban practices in the developing countries are of survival and necessity, at the same time the "alternative urbanism" holds the promise of development of a different, better city (Vasudevan, 2015). Modernity, once viewed as the experiences of Paris, London, Vienna, Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles, today is seen everywhere. Contrary to the idea that cities in the developing countries are somewhat "backward" and "underdeveloped", today there is a sense of the "contemporariness" and "worldliness" of African cities that can tell something profound about all cities in the world (Roy, 2009).
An essential feature of current urbanization in developing countries is that it appears to be decoupled from the industrialization process while the proportion of people employed in formal economy continues to decline. Informality today is the primary form of organization of the twenty-first-century metropolitan space in developing countries (Roy, 2009, 826). In African cities, informality often becomes a way of operating more resourcefully in an under-resourced environment. A strong trend towards informalization in Africa results in an overall growth of informal activity, but especially in the growth of informal settlements. It has also been noted that there is connectivity between formal and informal settlements as well as between formal and informal employment (Roy, 2009;Myers, 2011). Furthermore, researchers find a relationship between capital investment per capita in colonial Africa and slum incidence: the settler colonies of Southern Africa (contemporary Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe) that received relatively high levels of investment due to economic and political reasons have lower slum incidence than those countries developing under indirect colonial rules where urban settlements received lower investment and were managed with ad hoc institutions (Fox, 2014).
One of the major reasons for the rapid uncontrollable growth of urban population, often termed "overurbanization" or "pseudo-urbanization", lies in the rising inequality between rural and urban areas that continues to attract rural population into cities (Yeh, Yang, & Wang, 2015). Because contemporary cities in developing countries often grow in spite of poor microeconomic performance and without significant foreign direct investment and proper governmental regulations, urban authorities are unable to provide adequate basic infrastructure or essential services (Cohen, 2006). Consequentially, since the 1970s, the slum growth has outpaced urbanization (Seabrook, 2007). Contrary to a common belief that slum incidence is a transitional phenomenon as a product of slow market expansion and insufficient accommodation of labor migrants, the latest studies indicate that the persistence of slums is more likely to be attributed to land and housing market failures arising from economic and institutional weaknesses (Fox, 2014). From that standpoint, a country's colonial past plays a less important role in the production of modern urbanism than today's legal land ownership and institutional strength factors.
Three major factors usually account for city growth in a developing country: rural-urban migration, natural population increase, and changes in urban allocations, in that order of importance. Lack of investment, manufacturing job deficit, marginalization of migrants, and poor city planning, accompanying the "overurbanization" process, create the perfect-storm conditions for the expansion of urban slums. Contrary to the common impression of slums as exclusively informal settlements, any urban area that is characterized by some combination of tenuous dwelling structures, lack of access to adequate water and sanitation facilities, overcrowding, and insecure tenure, formal or informal, is considered a slum area (UN-Habitat, 2010;Fox, 2014). In African cities, specifically, colonial-time marginalization of local population, colonial planning, or post-colonial attempts to literally move capital cities to subvert the colonial legacies are considered to be the major sources of informality and slum production (Myers, 2011, 46, 69).
According to the UN-Habitat (2010), over 800 million people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America lived in slums by the end of the twenty-first century's first decade. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest slum incidence, with 61.7 percent of urban residents living in the sub-standard housing conditions. The 2010 UN-Habitat study showed that all over the world the number of slum dwellers had been decreasing, with the projected 227 million people moving out of slum areas between the years 2000 and 2010 thus almost doubling the slum target of Millennium Development Goal Number Seven (UN-Habitat, 2010). The bad news for Sub-Saharan Africa, however, was that the total proportion of people living in slums in this region had decreased by only five percent.
The most recent research indicates that the numbers of the world's poor, including slum inhabitants, have been largely underestimated. According to the latest estimates, Sub-Saharan African cities have twenty to forty million slum dwellers that have not been counted in the latest government censuses (Carr-Hill, 2013). The systemic underestimation of the urban destitute and underprivileged resident numbers results in inefficient urban policies and over-inflated progress toward the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (World Development Indicators, 2014). The latter claim may explain vast discrepancies in the reported proportion of Ethiopia's urban population residing in the slum areas. The report numbers, depending on the methods of estimation and the guidelines accepted for the delineation of slums, range from sixty percent to eighty percent, with even a larger jgg.ccsenet. range, from 2010).

Method
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Addis Aba in the city hosting thi city, with tripled sin rural-urban  While the legacies of urban land use and distribution during the Emperor Haile Selassie's regime are still tangible in Addis Ababa, the later command economy's urban-shaping attributes can be also traced in today's Addis Ababa housing stock deficiencies. The Marxist, pro-Soviet military Derg government (the short name for the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army), which was in power from 1974 till 1987, nationalized all land and property including rental houses. The kebeles, urban housing associations, served as low level administrative units that managed the housing stock. They, however, could not improve access to residential housing due to the overarching government landownership system. Following the Soviet Union footsteps, the centralized government cut rent by seventy percent that left little cash flow available for maintenance and construction. As a result, even twenty years after the demise of the Derg government, over forty percent of the former kebele houses needed replacement, and fifty to eighty percent of the remaining houses were informal (UN-Habitat, 2008). Today, the Ethiopian government still owns land and grants rental rights to the city residents. Twenty-nine percent of the formal dwellings have no separate room for cooking, and thirty-four percent of the residents use water from frequently interrupted public taps (UN-Habitat, 2008). The sanitation problem in Addis Ababa is one of the most acute as twenty-six percent of the formal houses (not including informal slums) have no toilets, an existing sewage system is outdated and inadequate, and thirty-five percent of the solid waste is never collected and thus dumped into ditches, rivers, roadsides, and other public spaces (UN-Habitat, 2008).
One of the most striking features of the Addis Ababa cityscape today is the extent of buildings under construction. The first impression is of a construction boom that suggests a positive dynamic momentum. At a closer look, however, many of these construction sites are half-finished office and apartment buildings that do not exhibit any signs of construction activity (Fig. 5). The Ethiopian government not only owns all land that is leased to private enterprises for a ninety-nine-year period; it also regulates prices of construction materials and company permits, access to financing and construction equipment. Private sector lending is restricted to short term loans with high annual interest rates while initial investment is required to comprise at least thirty-five percent of the estimated project's cost (Tesfahunegn, 1999). These strict regulations have been the main reason for the bulk of unfinished and often abandoned construction sites in Addis Ababa that create a peculiar impression of the city being in a permanent state of construction in progress. The chronic deficit of the most commonly used construction materials such as corrugated iron sheets and reinforced concrete slabs is an additional factor that determines delays in construction. The only construction material that seems to be in good supply is eucalyptus round wood used for scaffolding as well as for checa in low quality residential structures. The demand for the eucalyptus wood material supports one of the most common types of informal activities in the city usually carried out by women who can be seen hauling enormous piles of eucalyptus poles on their backs from the surrounding woods.
Due to the abundance of unfinished construction sites, the city air is polluted with suspended construction cement that poses a tangible health hazard, especially during dry winter months. Cement dust is mixed with unrestricted car exhaust, the second hazardous component of the city's air pollution due to the lack of exhaust regulations and the prevalence of used outdated automobiles in the streets. Most taxi cabs in Addis Ababa, popularly termed the "blue taxis", are old models of Lada, low quality automobiles that were built in the Soviet Union in cooperation with the Italian Fiat in the city of Tolyatti on the Volga River. Until recently, the city's public transportation demand was satisfied by the obsolete models of minivans, mostly former Soviet RAF once manufactured in Latvia, or VW minivans, in equally bad shape. A ride in an overcrowded shared minivan-taxi is cheap even by the Addis Ababa standards.
Of course, not all projects in Addis Ababa remain unfinished. Shanty houses in areas such as Kirkos, Lideta, Arat Kilo, and Kazanchis have slowly started to give way to new apartment buildings. By 2012, one-hundred-forty thousand new condominiums were built by the government. The major problem, reported by the city residents, is the complete lack of infrastructure, such as sewage systems, paved roads, or green zones in the new housing project areas (Mestika, 2012). The latest residential construction project in Addis Ababa is termed 40/60. This project may produce better results as future residents will be asked to deposit forty percent of the house value in advance with the remaining sixty percent to be covered by the government as a long term loan to residents. This project, however, might be available only to the newly forming Addis Ababa middle class thus again leaving the current slum residents behind.
Another example of a result-producing construction-in-progress is the first in Sub-Saharan Africa Addis Ababa light rail, the initial two lines having opened in the fall of 2015 (Addis Ababa Light Rail, 2016). The construction shut down traffic on all major city roads for at least four years but resulted in a seventeen-kilometer (eleven-mile) line connecting Mercato, the main city market, and Meskel, the central square, with the industrial park in the south jgg.ccsenet.org Journal of Geography and Geology Vol. 9, No. 1;2017 of the city, with the total of thirty-two stations on the way. The rail project was financed by the Export-Import Bank of China and constructed by the China Railway Group company. It is currently operated by the Shenzhen Metro Group (Addis Ababa Light Rail, 2016). Chinese capital today comprises the major investment inflow in Ethiopia, both in transportation and manufacturing. While virtually all road construction projects are outsourced to the Chinese companies, the largest industrial park south of metro Addis Ababa is also mainly represented by the Chinese investment in Ethiopian leather and shoe manufacturing (Jobson, 2013).

Addis Ababa in the Context of Ethiopia's Economic Transition
In 2007, for the first time in history, half of the world's population was living in urban areas. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of urban population is estimated to have risen from just ten percent in 1950 to over thirty-five percent at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Leon, 2008). In absolute terms, Africa's urban population is projected to more than double, from 295 million in 2000 to 748 million in 2030 (Cohen, 2006). Ethiopia, where still only nineteen percent of the population is urban (World Bank, 2015b), has been progressively urbanizing too. Thus, the population of Addis Ababa experienced a 6.8 times increase between 1952 and 2007, the year of the latest population census. While the Addis Ababa residents made up only one percent of the country's population in 1952, they already comprised 3.7 percent of the total in 2007 (estimated from Palen, 1974;The 2007 Population andHousing Census of Ethiopia, 2007). Addis Ababa is, in fact, one of these contemporary cities where informal activities and slum production coexist with modernity and creativity. It is usually the first impulse of a researcher to blame the historical vestiges of colonialism and oppression for our modern pains. However, in order to better understand the challenges of the city's contemporary development, the scrutiny should be directed not only at the Ethiopia's path-dependent housing legacies stemming from the landownership systems of the imperial and Derg eras but also at today's economic processes.
Ethiopia is a developing country that has been in transition from command to market economy since 1991, after the abolition of the Soviet-backed Marxist-oriented Derg regime and the ousting of the dictator Mengistu who fled to Zimbabwe. Although never formally colonized by any European power, Ethiopia experienced a relatively short Italian occupation between 1939 and 1941. Today Ethiopia is a federal parliamentary republic headed by a prime minister with the first democratic constitution adopted in 1995. The Ethiopian economy has experienced a staggering average annual GDP growth rate of 10.8 percent over the last fifteen years, placing it among the ten fastest growing economies in the world. In spite of this spectacular growth, Ethiopia is still one of the world's poorest countries, ranking two-hundred-eleventh out of two-hundred-twenty-nine countries based on its GDP per capita and classified by the World Bank (2015a) as a low-income economy with $470 GNI (Gross National Income) per capita. Over sixty-six percent of the Ethiopian population lives below $2 per day (World Bank, 2015b).
Since 1991, Ethiopia has come a long way from a command economy to a democratically-governed developing country. Market reforms, however, have not been consistently successful in Ethiopia and have not equally benefited the majority of the population, as reflected in its socio-economic indicators. While eighty-one percent of the population is still rural, only forty-two percent of the rural population has access to clean water. The HDI (Human Development Index), estimated as a complex statistical indicator combining income per capita with the country's educational level and life expectancy, is 0.442 on the scale from zero to one (List of Countries by Human Development Index, 2016) that is low even by the development country standards though it had been showing a steady improvement over the last several years (World Bank, 2015b). Why has not the extraordinarily high GDP growth rate translated into poverty reduction over the last two decades? The explanations may lie in Ethiopia's development model which favors the service sector expansion at the expense of manufacturing and in the inadequacies of the agricultural sector that still employs over eighty-five percent of the population but suffers from political and environmental quagmires resulting in the increasing rural-urban migration and ensuing overurbanization of the Ethiopia's primate city.
Ethiopia's agriculture, in spite of being the country's major economic sector accounting for 46 percent of Ethiopia's GDP, is marred by the recurrent droughts, the prevalence of small plots, increased government taxation on fertilizers, and lack of technological innovations. Coffee, the major agricultural cash crop in Ethiopia, has seen highly volatile prices with a tendency of decrease in the last decade. One of the major problems is Ethiopia's land tenure laws. All land is state-owned and individual families must pay annual governmental tax on using land for farming. Each successive generation of male descendants obtains parcels of land from their parents thus gradually decreasing the overall size of plots for each family (Hunnes, 2012a). Decreasing plot size alongside increasing land and fertilize input taxation and shortage of rainfall are the major drivers of rural-urban migration in Ethiopia. According to the latest survey of low-skilled laborers in Addis Ababa who had migrated from the rural areas (Hunnes, 2012b), the most commonly cited reasons for migration were inability to grow enough food or other agricultural products from their small plots and the need for more money and job opportunities. Unequal access to and inefficiency of such government programs as the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) designed to protect the poorest rural families during the times of droughts and other hardships, was also cited as one of the reasons for economic migration to the city. Unskilled and often illiterate rural migrants arriving in Addis Ababa usually find temporary low wage laborer jobs as shoe shiners, concession and lottery ticket sellers, and car washers, or resolve to begging in the streets, generally losing the community support they used to have in their villages (Hunnes, 2012b).
Ethiopia's service industries represented by the largest and the most successful airline in Africa, Ethiopian Airlines, and a fast-growing financial sector, account for forty-three percent of the GDP share; however, this value-adding activity has not resulted in a significant job creation. According to the same statistics, forty-three percent of the GDP value is created by only ten percent of the workforce. Ethiopia's service sector lacks such essential ingredients as a well-integrated domestic market, skilled labor force, and quality infrastructure necessary to be globally competitive in the areas of financial services or tourism (Ali, 2011) that today have become the major job creating agents in many developing countries. As it has been observed in other developing countries, service economy leads to social stratification and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor (Yeh et al., 2015).
The stunted job creation spurred by the service-driven growth model may also be the result of an extremely low level of foreign direct investment (FDI) accounting for only 0.8 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). FDI in Africa has gone from $15 billion in 2002 to $37 billion in 2006 and $46 billion in 2012; however, most of the capital inflows went to Northern and Western African countries (A Hopeful Continent, 2013). Ethiopia, while fundamentally dependent on import of most manufactured goods, has been largely excluded from the flow of global FDI (Reinert, 2007;World Bank, 2015b). Though Ethiopia did experience a significant FDI inflow increase since 1992 starting literally from a zero after the collapse of the pro-communist Derg regime, the annual capital investment in Ethiopia has been measured not in millions but in thousands of dollars. In contrast, the capital inflows to most of the fast developing export-oriented economies of East-, South-, and Southeast Asia have been thousands or even millions of times higher. Thus, while Ethiopian accumulated FDI as of 2013 was a meager $4.37 million, China accumulated $574 billion, India $191 billion, and Vietnam $78 billion (Ethiopia, 2016).
There are several possible reasons for the low FDI inflows in Ethiopia. One of the reasons is education poverty, especially primary education completion rate that, in spite of the long-term upward trend, remains below average for Sub-Saharan Africa (Reinert, 2007). Low educational level generally translates into lack of management skills and, consequentially, lack of human capacity to absorb FDI (Henze, 2003). Governmental policies of protectionism, an underdeveloped banking system subject to political pressure, and overarching bureaucracy and corruption are other commonly cited reasons that preclude international companies from investing in the Ethiopian economy (Henze, 2003;Robertson, 2009). The prevalence of small businesses, mostly consisting of sole proprietors, partnerships, or privately held corporations is not conducive to a massive foreign direct investment inflow (Robertson, 2009).

Discussion: Past Dependence Is Not a Destiny After All
Scholarship on urbanism in the developing world usually revolves around the marginalization of the poor as a result of the colonial path dependence and in the conditions of globalization of the world economy. Urbanization in Addis Ababa, however, defies many accepted canons by stemming from independent non-colonial development and almost two decades of the command economy. Ethiopia, while having finally joined the global economy, still lacks the same level of foreign investment and manufacturing as many other developing countries have achieved. The parallel urbanization traits in developing country cities on all continents represented by high slum incidence, growing income and consumption inequality, poor infrastructure, and hazardous pollution levels, may or may not be the result of market expansion and globalization or colonial past. The convergence of these attributes today recounted and analyzed in all large and medium cities of the developing world calls for finding a common denominator underlying this convergent development. This common denominator is more likely to be poor governance in the conditions of autocratic administration (be it the Emperor, the military socialism-oriented regime, or a corrupt ruling-party autocracy), resulting in lack of investment in public sphere and, too often, lack of interest in doing so due to shifting economic priorities to militarization and self-gratification. One exception to this pattern has been described in China where the ruling party, while having the power to control the flow of rural migrants into the largest cities, has been providing incentives to place industries in the rural areas thus managing to avoid the process of overurbanization, often referred to as "pseudo-urbanization" (Yeh et al., 2015). has been made evident by the recent African Economic Outlook 2016 report released by the African Development Bank Group focusing on the issues of structural transformations in sustainable cities (African Economic Outlook, 2016). The Ethiopian economic momentum presents an opportunity to eradicate or at least to reduce urban poverty while the main challenges lie in the lack of urban jobs and capital investment necessary for urban projects. The Ethiopian government has demonstrated an undisputable leadership and determination by almost unilaterally subsidizing the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile, the largest hydropower project in Africa. The GERD is funded by the government bonds with additional $1.8 billion in turbines and associated equipment financed by the Chinese banks. The GERD is the centerpiece of the government's proclaimed goal to "lift the population at large out of poverty before 2025" (Veilleux, 2013, 5). The dam has become part of Ethiopia's emerging mood of uplifting optimism and momentum which are expected to unify the country through economic development (Meredith & Givental, 2016). Unfortunately, capital is scarce for less grandiose projects such as residential and urban infrastructure investment. Some signs of the Addis Ababa urban improvements are visible in the arrival of the first light rail lines, and the growth, though often stunted, of residential and office buildings. Ethiopia's service-driven model of development creates much fewer jobs than any known industrialization model, be it import substitution or export-oriented development. While the former model requires a larger, better developed domestic market than is present in Ethiopia today, the latter model entails governmental promotion of foreign direct investment inflows. Ethiopia's agricultural inefficiency and outdated land tenure laws serve as push factors for rural-urban migration thus exacerbating Addis Ababa's need for job creation.
This study attempts to find the relationships between the historical legacies, contemporary economic path, and current urban issues. With the evidence of a long-lasting connection between the earlier landownership systems and the production of slums in Addis Ababa, the lingering question of why Ethiopia's exemplary consistent GDP growth rate over the last decade has not translated into poverty reduction still exists. The examination of the latest economic developments reveals the lack of capital investment and insufficient manufacturing job creation as the main culprits of poor urban infrastructure and restricted housing construction progress in the capital city. While investigating the reasons for the government's inability or unwillingness to attract significant amounts of FDI was out of the scope of this study, the available data indicate the link to the government's protectionist policies and control over the financial system. Some other reasons may include administrative corruption as the leftover of the command economy, lack of economic freedoms resulting from the direct state control, lack of human capacity due to the low educational level of the majority of population, and network of small businesses that are unable to attract large capital inflows. While these FDI entry barriers keep most foreign investors at bay, the largest capital inflow arrives from the Chinese government and Chinese private companies that have been aggressively investing in African manufacturing and infrastructure development without creating sufficient amount of local jobs or transferring much of technology or know-how (Adem, 2012, 152).
Successful urban management is a complex task that can be resolved only by prudent capital investment in the conditions of transparent and efficient governance. The three pillars of urbanism are education, housing, and infrastructure development; however, they cannot be achieved without long-term planning, efficient economic policies, and momentum. Addis Ababa's urban development process has created a city in constant redefinition, a city of modernity as well as of poverty. Everyone who visits Addis Ababa feels the excitement of this momentum followed by the disappointment of inertia and inefficiency. The convergence of Addis Ababa's urban attributes with those of many post-colonial African cities suggests an evident link between urban production of poverty and inefficient governance resulting in lack of investment in public education, housing and infrastructure. While unprecedented economic growth creates a positive uplifting momentum for Ethiopia, it should create conditions for its capital city to fight poverty through increased investment in residential construction, equal education opportunities, promotion of foreign investment, and creation of manufacturing jobs. New country-wide and city-specific urban policies are essential for completing these tasks.