IUSD Lecture: Breaking a city: Reflections on massive inner-city redevelopment project – Addis Ababa – International Urbanism

We warmly welcome you to a lecture titled ‘Breaking a City‘: Reflections on massive inner-city redevelopment project – Addis Ababa’ by Dr-Ing. Zegeye Cherenet Mamo on 12 May 2025 at 14h.

Addis Ababa is one of the few non-colonial Capital Cities in Africa founded in the 19^th century. For long, the city has been boasting as a city of ‘mixity’ – a place where the rich and the poor live together sharing both the good and the bad. The city has successfully defied successive planning interventions to maintain this original identity. However, the current massive inner-city redevelopment project, fueled by the desire to ‘modernize’ in order to seduce global capital, seems to succeed in breaking its historic resistance. The lecture reflects on the possible effects of the disassembling and speculate on the effect of its envisioned reassembling.

Zegeye Cherenet Mamo (Dr. -Ing.) is a practicing architect and urbanist. He studied architecture in Ethiopia (BSc.), India (MSc.) and Germany(PhD). He is an Assistant Professor and Head of Architecture and Design in EiABC-AAU. He also heads a research lab called Emerging Cities Lab (ECL-AA). He has been teaching and researching on architecture and urbanism for more than 30 years at various universities around the world and has published several journal articles, book chapters, and a book on architecture and cities. He also runs a consulting firm in Addis Ababa called OADUS Plc. Currently he is a Visiting Scientist at KIT- Karlsruhe.