Addis Abeba's Urban Facelift Paves Over Its Informal Soul

May 31 , 2025
By Ahmed T. Abdulkadir

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At dawn, a typical pedestrian in Addis Abeba begins what locals call “the sidewalk slalom.” She skirts an open manhole, hops a fresh trench, threads between scaffold poles and bargains with a fruit-cart vendor. Pavement here is less a right-of-way than an improvised stage where business and choreography meet.

Economists would call it a textbook tragedy of the commons. Garrett Hardin coined the term to describe pastures ruined by unrestricted grazing. He never set foot in Addis Abeba, yet his warning fits the strip of concrete outside a café. A public good that belongs to everyone but is unpoliced quickly becomes overused, then left to crumble.

Sidewalks, in theory, are for walking. In practice, they are primarily used by businesses. Not an inch lies idle. A shoe shiner claims one slab, a mannequin in knockoff couture another, and a vendor hawking belts from a sack the next. Addis Abeba’s public space is not contested so much as endlessly repurposed.

The city thus operates under what residents refer to as a political economy of absence. The municipality drafts plans, contractors dig channels, vendors ply trade, and residents complain. However, almost nobody maintains. Regulations exist, but they are often ineffective and misdirected, much like the rainy season. One morning, officials stage a sweep of informal traders; by evening, the same traders are back. Enforcement is less a rule of law than rule by rotation.

The economics are equally blunt. Sidewalks offer rent-free real estate, making them the ultimate expression of urban informality.

Why pay thousands of Birr a month for a kiosk when the pavement costs a few Birr in tribute and a game of hide-and-seek with inspectors?

In a city of opaque permits and zoning, informality feels less like rebellion than rational adaptation. That adaptation carries a cost. A common good becomes a venue for petty extraction. Individuals pocket gains yet contribute nothing to upkeep. Obstructions, litter and exposed rebar become externalities absorbed by passers-by. The pavement records the privatisation of benefits and the socialisation of risk.

Where, then, is the city administration?

Governance in Addis Abeba is contradictory. After decades of sprawl and decay, officials have re-emerged not to restore shared ownership but to impose top-down order. Along Africa Avenue (Bole neighbourhood) around Unity Park and on stretches of Churchill Avenue, new corridors sparkle with imported granite, manicured hedges and evenly spaced bins. These walks are clean, symmetrical, and smooth, more like a showroom floor than a public way, designed for visitors and dignitaries.

Their stools and shoeshine boxes, light enough to whisk away in a hurry, form the city’s most portable supply chain. Beyond the city centre, in Aqaqi, Jemo and Kolfe, the sheen evaporates. Pavement dissolves into potholed trails, half-finished trenches and drainage channels. Women with market bags and children with dust-caked shoes navigate parked minibuses, stagnant puddles and construction rubble. The municipality that choreographs marble tiles downtown leaves the margins to fend for themselves.

However, the many other neglected sidewalks illustrate Hardin’s tragedy. The gleaming lanes reveal a perilous opposite, an aesthetic overreach. In trying to “fix” public space, managers confuse gloss for stewardship and order for ownership. Half a century ago, urbanist Jane Jacobs cautioned against that instinct. Sidewalks, she wrote, are vital social infrastructure, animated by “eyes on the street” and everyday negotiation.

They are where civic trust is built, urban life is practised, and a city learns to live with itself.

Today’s refurbished corridors may dazzle, but they are socially vacant. Shoeshine boys, pensioners, vendors and idlers are gone. In their place stand stone planters, imported tiles and LED-festooned lamps. These are sidewalks without sidewalk life, causing Addis Abeba to slip into an enclosure. Medieval commons were once fenced off in the name of efficiency. Today’s sidewalks are cleared and curated in the name of modernity. The logic is familiar. Displace the informal, sanitise the organic, regulate the unplanned.

Officials defend the showcase corridors as proof of momentum. Design sketches circulate on social media, all drone angles and sunset filters. The experience is different. A marble ribbon that ends abruptly in gravel, a hedge uprooted so a parked Land Cruiser can mount the curb. Gloss seldom travels more than a few blocks before reality intrudes.

Regulars say the pattern repeats each construction season. Crews arrive to install water pipes or fibre cables, jackhammer slabs, and leave a ribbon of dirt before departing. Months pass before anyone returns to pour concrete; by then, the trench has filled with rainwater and candy wrappers. Pedestrians soon trace informal paths. When utilities come knocking again, the cycle starts anew, always shy of completion.

However, the informal economy adapts. Vendors retreat a few meters, returning at dusk when inspectors clock out.

The result is a two-speed city, one curated for the camera and one endured in dust. Public investment follows visibility, not vulnerability. What gets paved is what best performs the promise of a “rising city.” Sidewalks cease to be infrastructure; they become props in a pageant of prestige urbanism.

Repairing a sidewalk that no one owns requires more than another edict. It demands political clarity and democratic accountability. The paths need guardians, local councils, tenant associations, community hearings, backed by transparent zoning and steady enforcement. These tools are mundane, but they beat the next press release about a “beautified corridor.”

If the public is to protect the commons, planners should treat pavement neither as an afterthought nor a spectacle. Durable infrastructure lives in the middle ground, neither abandoned nor overdesigned, but co-owned, co-managed and responsive to how people actually inhabit space.

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PUBLISHED ON May 31,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1309]

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