ADDIS ABABA MERCATO: SUPPORTING EMERGING MARKET ECONOMIES AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO DEVELOPING HOUSING Brooke Helgerson Tactical Urbanisms: Fall 2012 Final Paper Washington University in St. Louis INTRODUCTION The ‘Humanitarian Paradox,’ from Refugee Camps into Urban Development Programs
The ‘humanitarian paradox’ is an increasingly recognized phenomenon in the field of global aid.
The term describes the situation in which humanitarian organizations and NGOs that give out food and employment to relieve the pressures of poverty or natural disaster in developing nations inadvertently “… implant [themselves] and take root in places” instead of giving control back to residents after a set period of time.1 As a result, the improvement initiatives meant to spur self-sufficient growth in locations of poverty become dependent on continued investment by the organization or NGO for survival. Michel Agier discusses this specifically in refugee camps, where the classification of refugees as ‘victims’ removes their ability to move beyond this status and return to their normal lives.2 In his analysis, this structure of perpetual aid prevents camps making the “…shift from the management… in the name of emergency towards the political recognition of their enduring reality.”3 These communities cannot reestablish an identity or a livelihood independent of the humanitarian aid, a condition that is further compounded by the isolation of camps far from any commercial center.4 Refugee camps represent an extreme case of the commercial vacuum of the humanitarian paradox, but the phenomenon can also be recognized in improvement initiatives that are implemented in dense urban centers. Housing development programs, which are often the subject of NGO and government improvement efforts, require recurrent external investment in order to be maintained because they only address one aspect of residents’ lives. When these programs are not considered as part of a larger economic framework, they provide no way for the improvements to be maintained because they ignore the economic poverty of those who will be living in the updated housing. Humanitarian efforts that focus on commercial and market elements of informal settlements are able to target investments of capital
directly to the infrastructure that already supports the people living there, thus allowing them to selfgenerate future improvements to their living and working conditions; these can last longer and require less continued support than investments in housing. The focus of these types of programs shifts from a single building to a system of infrastructure, and allows the social systems set up by the dwellers themselves to remain strengthened and intact.
This idea necessitates a study of the vital microeconomies that occur within every urban metropolis
today. These expand our understanding of the informal settlements where these economies occur by expanding our analysis of these places beyond merely their housing. The Mercato district of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, currently the subject of an improvement program directed specifically at its market, and is thus a fitting case study to explore the potential of these ideas. More important than this one program, however, are the steps taken by its residents and vendors to change their environment and band together to establish a voice of the Mercato. The combination of these two types of commercial intervention makes this approach much stronger than interventions that focus only on housing.
To reveal the relationship between the commercial and housing interventions, this paper will first
study the Mercato both in the contexts of the city and in global economic patterns. The commercial potentials of the Mercato will then be expanded upon in connection with the informal practices that are already in place there. Finally, an analysis of the structure of current housing and commercial programs will be explored to further understand their potentials for effecting change in suffering areas.
CITY CONTEXT: ADDIS ABABA Development of the City
Unlike most other cities in the northern Africa-Middle Eastern region, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital
city, has no ties to ancient history. [Figures 1-2,4-5] It was situated at the foot of the Entoto Mountains in 1886 by Emperor Menelik II as a new capital, the last of many that cities he had founded during his reign. Though Addis Ababa was eventually kept as a permanent capital, with several modern developments such as roads, schools, postal service, and electricity initiated by the Emperor, it developed without any formal plan until 1935.5 It nevertheless developed a unique urban character due to the way land was initially distributed to the nobility. Land was originally granted to King’s rases, or generals; these were used as camps, and each generals subordinates also settled nearby.6 Eventually these camps grew into neighborhoods, or sefers, and the distributed pattern of poverty and wealth remained. It is interesting that the adjacency of very wealthy and very poor areas has persisted even into the modern day as Addis Ababa has exploded in growth.7
It is now Ethiopia’s largest city, and has grown from 100,000 in 1935 to 4 million today.8 [Figure 3]
Much of this growth has been the result of Ethiopia’s staggering
rural poverty and its late entrance to urbanization. It is the 10th poorest nation in the world, with a GDP per capita of only $376 USD.9;10 Currently the country only has 17% of its population living in urban areas, though it now has one of the fastest rates of urbanization in the world, 5%.11 Since there are so few urban areas in the country, this makes the consequences of the influx of rural immigrants to Addis
Figure 1: Ethiopia
especially difficult to deal with. Historically lacking a plan for growth, the city now lacks the infrastructure to accommodate new immigrants. As a result, over 80% of the city’s population lives informal areas, which are characterized by extreme poverty and lack of infrastructure or stable housing.12 Without an integrated government structure, the city has also limited the implementation of any program to upgrade or improve these conditions. It was only in 1991 that the government stabilized into its modern form (following a 5-year Italian occupation
Figure 2: City Location Map
of the Empire from 1936-1941 and socialist rule by the militant group known as the Dergs from 1974-1991).
The current government, the Federal Democratic Republic
of Ethiopia, has been run by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) since 1991 (and officially since 1995). Though this government has had to deal with some periods of war and violence, they have recently begun to implement peaceful measures that make development and improvements possible. These improvements were enabled primarily by the decentralization of government in 1991, which transformed the country into a federal system with 9 states, giving each one more control over the policy and infrastructure in its own region.13
Addis Ababa is a special case within this, because it acts as a
state under direct federal control .14 Decentralization in the city has led
Figure 3: Areas of development of the city in past decades, showing its exploding growth (Tolon 15).
Figure 4: City wealth and density data
20% formal 80% informal
Figure 5: Contextual Analysis Diagram Addis Ababa detail showing mountain geography, sefer organization, the Mercato, and various points of interest in the city. Though the wealth disparityis great, wealthy and impoverished areas are distributed throughout the city with a high degree of adjacency.
5 ppl/
800 ppl/
hectacre
hectacre
City Boundary
OT ENT O
MOUNTAINS
Original Center City St. George’s Church
Melenik’s Palace
Lideta Mall Development
Bole Airport
to the implementation of many housing programs (initiated by both the government and outside agencies) that have been able to assert more of an impact on the city than those initiated before 1991. However, these improvements have been plagued by a lack of funding and skilled workers, and, with dilapidation, there is still a need for over 350,000 housing units to meet the current demand on the city.15 Several housing programs in the last several decades have failed to make much of an impact on this need.
Housing Improvement Projects
The lack of stable government structure has had a large effect on the implementation of housing
improvement plans in Addis Ababa, and in Ethiopia as a whole. Prior to the 1974 revolution, which resulted in the Derg socialist regime, there were a few masterplans developed but never acted on. The economic structures that could have provided loans to potential homeowners were also lacking.16 The only one that had any success was the Kolfe Low Cost Housing Scheme, which actually displaced residents from their homes in favor of the development of large-scale commercial development.
After 1974, things changed a bit with the nationalization of land throughout the country (previously,
95% of the land had been held by only 5% of the population).17 Though this measure negatively disrupted the housing market, it did spur several other housing programs that were initiated by NGOs. Over the years these organizations, including the Norwegian Save the Children Fund, CONCERN, OXFAM, CARE, have enacted several small scale improvement projects directed at specific neighborhoods, or kebele, within the city. [See Appendix A] Since 1991 when the country stabilized under the EPRDF, the government has carried out a few more initiatives. The Environmental Development Office tasked itself with the goals ranging from housing development to job creation.18 Though it has been successful at working with communities and donor foundations to raise money, it is still hindered by lack of departmental communication and an unclear method for fulfilling such wide-reaching goals.19 The Housing Development Project Office has focused on housing as its main goal; however, its objective of building 400,000 units within five years is also wideranging and difficult to reach.
The question with these projects lies not in if these goals can actually be met; instead, it is more
important to ask if these are the right needs to fulfill. Even if the units can be constructed, the end product will still be a building that require a great deal of money to own, operate, and upkeep. Because most of the budget is allocated for the project’s up front costs, there is no funding for this requirement and it falls to the responsibility of the dwellers. Keeping in mind that many of these new residents cannot afford to own legally the more dilapidated housing they had previously, it makes no sense to assume that they can maintain the
costs of upkeep for these new improvement dwellings. Thus, the building can only solve the problem of shelter, but not the problem of ownership, dwelling, or sustainable income.
Infrastructural projects have shown more success in effecting
a wider range of benefits for less cost. The two main programs of relevance that were studied by one researcher are the Entoto Integrated Urban Development Program (or EIUDP), an integrated infrastructural project being developed by the non-profit PRO-PRIDE,
Figure 6: Housing program cost per beneficiary Housing Programme: 240 Euro/person Infrastructure Program: 14 Euro/person (Tolon 120).
and the Condominium Housing Program, a housing project being developed by the city and the German Technical Corporation, or GTZ.21 [Figure 6-8] As the tables show, the cost per beneficiary for the EIUDP is significantly less than those that focus on housing. It was also able to cover more urban issues, because each one of them was more manageable in scale than an entire housing development.
It is hard to assess the results of these programs, since they
are all still in progress. The city is currently in the process of revising and adopting a new city master plan, developed by the City Planning
Figure 7: Additional housing-infrastructure project cost comparison (Tolon 146).
Project Office of Addis Ababa (CPPOAA). Though the details of the plan have not been published, a section that directly protects the Mercato from future large-scale development was included because of resistance from residents and vendors to that type of development.22 This issue will be discussed further below.
Figure 8: Additional project scope of EIUDP infrastructure program (Tolon 123).
THE MERCATO: LOCATION AND ECONOMICS Size and Activity
The current location of the Mercato is a result of segregation
by the Italians during their occupation of the city during World War II. [Figure 9-10] Before the war, it had been located further east, near the main church of the city, St. George’s, which was built by Emperor Menelik II when Addis Ababa was founded.23 This original location was more prominent. However, the current Mercato has flourished and even
Figure 9: Mercato location within the city (background map: http://www.felixheisel.de/html/blackplan.html).
directed new city growth, despite its location further away from the
ADDIS KETEMA DISTRICT
city center.24 Because the market as a whole was never planned, this
Grand Anwar Mosque St. Raguel Church and School
growth comes as a result of the individual merchants who make up the Mercato. They have no real titles or land grants to the spaces they sell on; instead, they occupy the streets, an open corner, or whatever space
Cemetary
they can find.
The Mercato, now located in the Addis Ketema district, is one
GOLA SEFER
of the largest markets in all of Africa. It covers over 10 square miles and sells items as diverse as handmade jewelry, produce, electronic parts, and used stereos. [Figures 11-13] Many of the products sold are agricultural, and thus include a wide range of spices and coffee. Though there are no hard boundaries as there is in a western mall, the Mercato is organized into zones that specialize in groups of good such as metalwork, plastics, or electronics.
School or Church
Figure 10: Tactical Urbanism Location Map and Urban Analysis The Mercato functions as an area of commerce and residence, and so is surrounded by a few schools and churches. The location of the tactical urbanism takes place in between the buildings, in the streets.
These features are typical of many other informal (and formal)
markets; what sets the Mercato apart is the sheer scale of people that take part in its interactions: around 500,000 people pass through it each day.25 Some of these are the 200,000 people who live and work in the district, including the 14,000 vendors who sell there regularly.26 For many of them, the market is a constant presence in their lives: it provides both their livelihood and their home. Because of this, the market serves not only as a center of commerce; it is also “…a place
Figure 11: Produce
of residence, social encounter, and religious worship.”27 The residents come from diverse backgrounds, and many of them are drawn to this specific place because of its notoriety as Ethiopia’s largest market. Addis Ababa is by far the country’s largest and most urbanized city, and the market it houses provides one of few opportunities for those suffering in rural areas to take part in the benefits of a city. Indeed, it is this informal economic activity, most of which occurs in the Mercato, that is responsible for 51% of the labor force and half of the cash transactions in the city.28; 29
Figure 12: Electronics
Informal Economics in Related Environments
The Mercato is not alone. Micro-economic activities are
significant parts of informal settlements because residents must find their own way to provide some of the resources that are out of their reach in the main city. These are often spontaneous in development
Figure 13: Coffee
and occur in the dwellers’ residences. Because of this, they are usually dispersed throughout the area. For example, the microbusinesses of Valparaiso, Chile, are located throughout the many hills of the city. Despite this, they still make up 81% of the businesses and account for 12% of the capital generated in the city.30
There are also several dense informal markets that function
much like the concentrated Mercato. In Durban, South Africa, there is a large market area concentrated in the city’s leftover space under transportation infrastructure. This market sees 460,000 people a day, many from the main city, and has a large base of vendors who also live in the area.31 Recent improvements to the infrastructure of the markets and sanitation has resulted in an improved quality of life and increased profit potential for the vendors. This market, as well as the Mercato and many others, have become unique hinges to informal settlements because they directly interface with people living outside of the settlement boundaries. They provide goods and services that are relevant to the whole city, and serve as a point of connection between the formal and informal communities.
Actual Conditions and Economic Potentials
The Mercato’s current condition, despite its economic
significance, is congested and polluted. [Figure 14] Streets are constantly jammed, sanitary infrastructure is lacking, waste removal is infrequent, and there are no community amenities such as schools or hospitals.32 The market vendors experience specific hindering conditions, such as lack of lockable storage space, water and sewer
Figure 14: Waste in the Mercato
and availability of shelter. Though they do operate outside of the city’s conventional legal structure, the informal economy they create provides an asset to the city that can’t be ignored.
The Mercato fits into what Robert Neuwirth calls ‘System D.’ The ‘D’ comes from an African-French
slang term debrouillard, which is used to indicate a person who is resourceful.33 Thus, System D refers to an improvised and self-initiated economy that, despite the informality of these terms, is a significant player in the global economy. In a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, it is estimated that 1.8 billion people work within a System D economy type.34 The earnings in these economies as an aggregate are also large: one market in Sao Paulo that sees 400,000 shoppers daily and has 8,000 merchants brings in nearly $10 billion a year.35 The Mercato, though in much different conditions than Brazil, sees at least as many shoppers a day. Neuwirth’s estimates for System D worldwide are even more astonishing, coming in at $10 trillion (which makes this a collective GDP second only to the United States’ economy).36
The Mercato thus plays a role in a significant economic development that is taking place in the
world today. Like many informal markets within System D, the Mercato performs economically even while it suffers conditions of impoverishment. Its productivity could benefit from improvements in the infrastructure systems that run through the market, including water and sewer drainage for sanitation. These measures do not attempt to interfere with the relationships already developed by the informal vendors, nor does it give them a one-time gift of providing a need such as housing that they can’t afford to upkeep. Instead, they make it easier for vendors to earn a living, which they can then invest into their own futures in the form of dwelling improvements or sending their kids to school. This solution ultimately reduces costs for all parties involved by focusing on catalyzing economic development that can self-generate in the future.
Outside the ‘Society of Control’
This economic benefits of the informal market are created in large part by the informal market’s
position outside the mainstream city. When people are left out of municipal governance, they are forced to devise their own mechanisms for operating. The result in the Mercato has been a rich set of relationships that work together to create the larger benefits discussed above. These depend on their unique position outside of the ‘society of control’ that Gilles Deleuze argues permeate society today.37 In the society of control, people are regulated (whether they know it or not) to the finest detail. Their every move turns into data that is collected by the government; in the process, they become digitized into ‘dividuals’ that are more important for the information they can give than their personality.38 This idea of digital control correlates to
Focault’s concept of biopower, which sees the power of technology to collect intimate data about people as a negative aspect of progress. Cities extend this process with the idea of biopolitics, where they both collect and are able to control their citizens through an increased use of data management. Though this ‘big data’ can be useful for urban designers to understand cities and their issues on a somewhat individual scale,39 Focault and Deleuze analyze it for its darker potentials. In their works, everyone is unwittingly a part of these societies of control; however, places like the Mercato are not yet part of this digital realm. As an informal settlement, they are not regulated or monitored by the government; indeed, it is quite difficult to obtain any real data about how many people live there or what the geographic and infrastructural conditions are.
Thus the Mercato operates in an open juridical space, or one that is not controlled as a jurisdiction of
the municipality. In our western world of defined territories, it is hard to imagine a space being uncontrolled. But even the streets of Rome were once such places, before development changed the character of the street from being a place for interaction and commerce to one primarily of thoroughfare, of getting from point a to point b.40 This open juridical space proves to be a large benefit for the Mercato. If, for example, the Mercato did become regulated and the transactions that take place there were suddenly taxed, many who make just enough to survive would not be able to cope.
In this respect, the Italian relocation of the market out of the city center actually had a liberating
effect for the Mercato. Because of this, development efforts were focused on the main areas of St. George’s Church and the Palace. The Mercato avoided control and regulation that was typical of the ‘space war,’ introduced by Zygmunt Baumann, that occurs when governments standardize and start to regulate their territories. As Baumann discusses in Globalization: The Human Consequences, there is a control through mapping of territories that usually occurs when a government or other power gains enough momentum to begin exerting power over people.41 While the Mercato is part of the city and not excluded from maps, its position as informal has allowed some of the spontaneous settlement character to remain.
This informality is in many ways one of the largest positive factors of the Mercato, though it does
have its drawbacks. There are several tactical approaches taking place in response to these drawbacks. Led by the people themselves, they begin to be read as a type of improvement system. It is important to recognize the methods of these bottom-up developments, as the success of any outside commercial intervention depends on fitting into the system of relationships already in place.
BENEFITS OF THE MERCATO COMMERCIAL STRUCTURE: TACTICAL URBANISM The Mercato Experience: Field Condition
In order to better discuss how issues of development are addressed in the Mercato, it is necessary
delve further into the experience of the market environment. The complex workings and interactions that take place in markets around the world occur at a scale that is at once larger and more personal than what is commonly seen in Western centers of commerce, such as suburban shopping malls and downtown office skyscrapers. Robert Neuwirth, in his book The Steal of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, gives an account of such a market:
“A vendor selling slide whistles blasts a mocking trill—several times a minute, seven hours a day. Across the street, a husky man standing in front of a huge heap of clothes hollers, “Cheap underpants!” …Next to him, a hawker with a tray full of pirated evangelical mix tapes blasts a stereo powered by a car battery… Around the corner, two vendors with plastic windup launchers shoot small helicopters high above them…”42
Though this specific sequence is about vendors in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the hectic nature of their selling
process is also characteristic of the Mercato in Addis Ababa. Here, all space is permeated with transaction. There is no centralized store where people concentrate, instead, people buy and sell goods in stalls, on the streets, in corners, or any other space they can find. Most vendors operate without leases, so boundaries between things and people “…are blurred by the casual unfolding of events, simply by the way things go, for the quasi-formal market organization is persistently thrown off balance by informal market practices.”43
While this seems like a potentially chaotic situation, Neuwirth argues that there is actually a high
degree of “unwritten rules… The chaos here is meticulously organized.”44 This organization through many unrelated elements—the vendors themselves—is crucial to the way the market works and its ability to have more wide-ranging effects than areas of the city that focus on housing alone. The vendors act as the pieces that make up a sort of infrastructure, and it is this “complex social network… [that] ensures the performance of the overall system.”45 The dependence of the Mercato on the individuals living there can be classified as what Stan Allen calls a field condition. Here, it is the relationships between parts, rather than their form, that is acts as an organizing device. Individual vendors and residents can be considered parts of this system because the parts are not fragmentary but can be whole in their own right. This structure is “inherently expandable… [and] an elaboration of conditions established locally, ”46 and so is highly adaptive to future
change in its structure. Though Allen relates these ideas to the lasting success of architecture over time (the Alhambra specifically), this idea also correlates to the ability of the Mercato to weather any change in development that cannot be predicted by a master plan. Keller Easterling argues for a similar focus on relationships in her use of disposition, an element inherent in organized physical objects that “locates activity, not in movement or event, but in relationship or relative position.”47
The positioning of the Mercato as a field condition suggests that housing, because it relies on single
or groups of forms in order to be realized, functions as an object. The properties of an object are more difficult to change as its surroundings develop; thus, when the conditions a housing project is designed around change, there is little recourse for adapting to them. This prevents the housing from continuing to be useful for the people it was made for. The Mercato, because its relationships are flexible and determined by the users who create its own context, does not have this pitfall. Instead, it can act as an ‘active form,’ which Easterling defines as an “agency or contagion within a spatial field.”48 The vendors and residents of the Mercato can become these agents simply by responding to their surrounding conditions. Because the overall character of the market is created from the aggregate of these interactions, it can naturally adapt to any given situation. This characteristic, along with the ability of the parts of the field to multiply easily, has great effect when considering the power of market-based interventions to enact change. When investments are made into the infrastructure that makes this possible instead of into a housing building, several of the ‘parts,’ or people, can be strengthened at once to earn a livelihood and improve their own conditions. Furthermore, as discussed above, this objective would require much less investment in a housing project per person affected by its changes.
Mercato Spatial Structure
As in many informal settlements, land ownership is often lacking in the Mercato. As a result, the
typical property borders of space, like those seen in the west, do not exist. Instead vendors and buyers fill all available space, and a high degree of them operate on the streets, as Neuwirth discusses above. Most of their structures are thus impermanent; any investment they do make into their space in the Mercato becomes an example of tactical practice, as discussed by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life.49 In this work, de Certeau analyzes the practices of those on the margins, and how they make use of their given situations to produce results outside of any hierarchical or given power. The use of the streets is an example of such an “insinuation into the other’s place” which depends not on the place itself, but on the correct timing of taking advantage of the space—and “opportunity… seized ‘on the wing’.”50 This
idea of tactical insertion into the structure created by a larger power
Tactical Urbanism Design Documentation:
structure contrasts with the idea of strategy, which de Certeau defines as “possible when a subject of will and power…can be isolated from an ‘environment’.”51 A strategy, then, depends on an overarching plan, much like those developed in Addis’ many housing development programs. These programs act as objects, not fields, in Allen’s understanding. Their strategy of effecting change through one building, without considering the other necessary spaces in people’s lives, would clearly not work in the Mercato, which gets its strength from the aggregation of the in-between spaces that are vitalized by all those who work within them.
Figure 15: Figure-ground relationship typical of Western commerce
These resulting spatial qualities are unique compared to how
commercial areas often operate in the west. Instead of having the main destination of commerce located in buildings [Figure 15], the tactical urbanism takes place on the streets. [Figure 16] It is interesting to note that the surface area of the streets is inherently larger than any one building development. [Figure 17]. It correlates, then, that any interventions that take place here can have a much broader effect than those located in a single structure. Figure 16: Tactical location in the streets
Figure 17: The surface area of the streets in the Mercato are equal to roughly 33 builings. Any housing project would have to fulfill the equivalent of this in order to reach the same amount of beneficiaries.
Tactical Use of ‘Bricolage’
The presence of tactical operations extends beyond the use
of space in the Mercato. It also is seen in the reuse and resale of available goods and resources in the area, such as turning tires into bags, bottles into toys, or metal into containers and utensils.52 [Figure 18-19] This is a tactic directed at making profit from something that is freely available in a process of bricolage, a term de Certeau uses to indicate the makeshift recombination of things that are readily
Figure 18: Freely available material... (Angelil 10).
available into something that fulfills the need of the user.53 By taking advantage of the things that are available to them instead of relying on importing goods to fulfill their needs, vendors create a “reliability within the situations imposed on [them], that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires.”54 In this sense, the vendors are creating their own positive environment out of the given conditions of the Mercato.
This is similar to the actions of the Zabaleen community in
Cairo, Egypt. They are communities located around the city that perform an informal garbage collection service for the city. Though they don’t get paid by the households for this service, they are able to sell the garbage after they have sorted it by hand.55 The Zabaleen are performing bricolage by combining their transportation and sorting capabilities with a freely available product that needs to be removed. This process then allows them to earn a living. The vendors of the Mercato direct their sales of found and collected goods to the same purpose—of developing a livelihood. Their processes are more diverse, though there is a presence of a recycling community within the Mercato.
Figure 19: ...converted into useful containers (Angelil 10).
Resistance of ‘Time-Space Compression’
The street vendors continue their tactical practice by not only
manipulating goods, but also conventional time schedules. As Neuwirth outlines, it is typical of informal markets for different vendors occupy the streets at different times of day.56 Thus the daily schedule of the Mercato does not operate in large static chunks, but rather at the micro scale of the commercial interactions. Transactions are always ongoing; there is no ‘dead time’ of the Mercato as there might be in a mall during workday hours, because the workplace and commercial space are one and the same. This produces an understanding of the Mercato where people are always moving, goods are always changing hands, and the overall structure is in constant flux. Time becomes very specific, and representative of the vendors that circulate at different periods throughout the day.
The micro scale of these schedules, both of time and of the
Figure 20: Addis Mercato in 1935 (http://addisababamap.blogspot.com/2005/09/addisababa-from-1986-to-vision.html)
vendors’ use of space, resists the ‘time/space compression’ that Zygmunt Baumann introduces in Globalization.57 This phenomenon is one that occurs as our world becomes globalized and digitized, and we have increased access to information from all places at all times. Baumann argues that the compression is negatively affection our patterns of social organization: because we are no longer rooted in the places we actually live in, there are increased occurrences of exclusion and separation.58 While informal markets are not excluded from this discussion, a study of their space and time operations show them to be outside of this compression. Instead of promoting homogeneity, as happens in the globalized market where goods of all types and origins can be ordered online and delivered anywhere, the Mercato works at a very specific micro-industry and real-time scale. For example, a vendor may specialize in selling things like small toys or electronics. In order for interested buyers to connect with these available goods, they must actually go to the Mercato. This sets up a requirement of direct
Figure 21: Addis Mercato today
interaction between buyers and sellers. The time of each interaction cannot be compressed into a few clicks in an online marketplace as it can elsewhere across the globalized world. Thus, it is because the Mercato has less connectivity that it is able to resist the changes brought by globalization and compression. This resistance allows the Mercato to survive and even strengthen in a way that a single housing project cannot. Indeed, it can be seem from the following photographs that the vibrancy of the Mercato today appears to be much the same as it was nearly 80 years ago. [Figure 20-21]
Local and Global without Deprivation
Though the Mercato is large, it can be viewed as a distinct neighborhood with a local character.
The way it creates this locality comes not from one individual, but the residents and vendors of the area as a group involved in a specific mechanism of interaction: commerce. This structure of locality is different from the ‘local’ that Baumann discusses in his continuing argument on globalization. Baumann associates being local with being immobile in a world that requires constant flexibility. Thus immobility and localization become “a sign of social deprivation and degradation.”59; 60 However, the locality created by the Mercato is not one of deficiency. Instead, it is one that produces identity for its inhabitants. Arjun Appadurai discusses this process of locality in Modernity at Large, making the argument that the production of locality is a constant process in which the local area must defend itself and be “maintained carefully against various kinds of odds.”61 The Mercato, with its multiple sets of commercial interactions, provides a structure that can preserve a sense of identity. There is a sense of purpose taking place with each transaction. This differs from the forced interactions characteristic of newly developed residential areas of informal settlements, which may make it difficult to develop a local identity and the “complex and deliberate practices of performance, representation, and action”62 that Appadurai deems necessary as a defense to global pressures. Without this, the locality of informal settlements often acts to isolate them from the opportunities of mobility in the global world, such as those granted by the internet and access to information and goods from all parts of the world.63
The economic activity of the Mercato not only empowers the local identity of the area, but also
provides it with the beginnings of a connection to the global, in the form of a connection to the surrounding city. Vendors know who they are, and their role in the Mercato’s economy is solidified with each sale they make. People all over the city go to the Mercato to obtain goods, which also identifies the area from the rest of the city. The Mercato thus acts as an ethnoscape, an identifier of a form of neighborhood distinct from its surroundings, and another key element of Appadurai’s discussion by which identity is measured. The
“continuous construction” required to produce such an ethnoscape is made possible by what Appadurai calls a ‘context-generative’ environment.64 In these, the conditions set up for living are natural, not imposed by outside forces. This allows people to generate their own context and thus define their own neighborhood identity. This contrasts with a context-produced environment, in which people are forced to live together because of political or natural forces (an example being
Figure 22: Efficient use of space
a refugee camp or temporary camp set up after a natural disaster destroys homes).65 A context-produced environment can easily occur in the housing created by many of the improvement programs. Because they are multi-family in structure, they are forcing a group of people to live together in conditions they otherwise wouldn’t choose. This makes it even more difficult for them to form a common bond or identity. This comparison provides further reason why improvement programs are better directed at commercial programs such as the Mercato, which are
Figure 23: Multiple forms of transportation coexist
inherently context-generative.
Group Solidarity and Organization
The importance of the commercial structure of the Mercato in
forming locality is not only for the individuals’ benefit, but also for how they function as a group in the city or global context. Though their individual interactions as part of the ‘field’ are separate, the success of any improvement program directed at a market depends on the
Figure 24: Utilizing all available space
ability of these components—people—to come together. This is also indicative of the difference between commercial- and housing-oriented programs; while the housing type is usually strategic and originates from an organization in power, the commercial type works more on the in-between. Because of this, it requires more user feedback in order to determine exactly how to provide improvement. The processes of interaction are highly developed in the Mercato and need to be preserved in any future development. Instead of trying to relocate
Figure 25: Display of multiple goods and vendor type-sectorization
residents, projects should focus on the infrastructure that strengthens their abilities to carry out their daily tasks. In order to make this happen, it is important that the vendors of the Mercato band together to communicate their needs. The tactical analysis/tactical urbanism detail photos [Figures 22-25] show some of these specific conditions needed to maintain the spontaneous character of the Mercato.
The individuals of the Mercato have provided a successful
example of this by forming several craftsmen associations and trade unions.66 [Figure 26] These groups have been able to resist some of the recent formal development proposals being directed at the Mercato area. For example, during the implementation of the new development plan by the CPPOAA, there was interest from a Malaysian investment company in buying the area of the Mercato and turning it into a shopping district.67 This project provided a potential for the market to become a truly global and modernized area, but put a huge pressure on both city officials who wanted the investment, and residents who did not want to be relocated. Ultimately, it was negotiations between the local trade unions of the Mercato and city officials that stopped the new development.68 If this organization within the Mercato hadn’t happened, what may have resulted is a space out of scale and character with the area that would have required a large amount of money and relocation in order to complete. This result demonstrates the importance of organizing at the grassroots level in order to form a voice against unwanted change.
The speculative before and after photos that follow show what
could have happened to the Mercato if a shopping center was allowed to develop. The example used for comparison is the Lideta Mall project, which is currently under construction in a different part of the city. [Figure 27]
Figure 26: Trade associations construct a vocational training site (Angelil 11).
Lideta Mall
Mercato
vast open space, mostly unused
efficient use of space
spaces for leisure time...
but no leisure class
foreign form requires difficult construction
simple form allows for utilization of space
Figure 27: A potential before and actual after
HOUSING AND COMMERCIAL INTERVENTION STRUCTURES Mercato Recent Developments
The stabilization of the government into the Federal Republic in 1995, has allowed the
implementation of various improvement plans around the city to flourish. These come from several sources, including government programs and those initiated by NGOs.69 The city has also initiated the Addis Ababa Development Plan in the past 10 years, a new version of which is to be completed by the end of this year. This plan includes an extensive study conducted by the CPPOAA that looks at the city’s 116 woredas, or neighborhoods.70 This plan includes plans for the Mercato specifically, the final version of which is a resultant of interaction with the trade associations that have developed in the Mercato.
In addition to specific market attention in the city’s Development Plan, there are other initiatives
taking place in the Mercato. The most significant one is the market improvements led by the German Technical Corporation, or GTZ, which is also heavily involved in some of the housing improvement and construction programs taking place in Addis Ababa. This plan involves all relevant parties involved, including city officials, trade organizations, individuals, and NGO and international institution representatives. In fact, GTZ’s primary role is to act as an intermediary.71 The issues they are targeting currently include increased security throughout the Mercato (and the development of a fee structure so all stall-holders will pay for this service themselves), improvement to sanitary systems and waste disposal, and maintenance of footpaths.72 The approach they have for this is unique: instead of relying solely on NGO or charitable donations for funding, they are looking to build partnerships with the private sector and the informal vendors themselves.73 This will allow the program to eventually take on its own financial responsibility. Already, the trade associations are building headquarters and vocational training centers to increase their standing within the Mercato.74
Financial Structure of Housing vs. Commercial Programs
The financial structures of the commercial improvements discussed above vary greatly with those
initiated by the housing programs discussed earlier. Whereas in housing projects money originates from institutions or donor organizations and is directed into a building, the commercial-infrastructure approach invests into the systems that people across a whole neighborhood use. These systems, such as water or sewer piping, waste removal, or market stall shelter and storage spaces, make life easier for residents and vendors. If they don’t have to spend time collecting water from far away or removing waste from their homes to locations far away, they can spend more time working to earn a livelihood for themselves and
their families. It is in this way that funding for these types of programs, though it may initially come from institutions, is able to become selfregenerating.
These intentions behind each type of program parallel the
Institution
distinction between planners and searchers as brought up by William Easterly in Reinventing Foreign Aid.75 Housing programs demonstrate a planning objective because they have ‘big goals’ and ‘big plans’
Infrastructure
meant to totally alleviate decaying housing situations.76 The type of new housing that might be needed is never questioned, and thus is not critically designed to meet the specific needs of an area. Money
People
is budgeted and allocated to fulfill the components of the big plan, such as the building structure and land purchasing. However, the after-effects, such as the residents’ ability to pay for necessary
Network
improvements in the future, are often left out of this allocation.
Commercial-related programs that focus on infrastructure
function more along the searcher method of funding, where
Figure 28: Benefit flows of commercialbased approach
addressable problems are sought out, studied, and understood before a response is created. The answers are not assumed in advance; instead, these programs are put forth based on research, and are monitored to see what parts are effective and which ones need to be revised.77 Institution Because the scale of the project is smaller and require less money up
Institution
front, any revisions necessary are adaptable into the budgeting of the project. In addition to avoiding wasting funds, the searcher method of Infrastructure the commercial program allows for money to be created. This happens
Housing componentland
as each individual affected by the infrastructure upgrades can spend more time on furthering their own situation than just getting by. People The commercial-based approach allows money spent on improvements
Housing componentbuilding
to act as a network. As each person affected gains free time that they can direct towards earning a living, the people they interact with also Network benefit from easier or quicker access to goods. The benefits then
multiply exponentially, as seen in Figure 28. The housing approach
People Figure 29: Benefit flows of housing approach
functions more as a hierarchy, where the bulk of the funding is located in once place then allocated to different elements down the line. [Figure 29] The key difference between the two is that once the money reaches the end of the hierarchy in the housing approach, it is spent and more must be obtained in order to continue the project’s upkeep. Its continuation does not rest in the hands of the people, but remains under the control of the organization directing the program. This is the condition of the humanitarian paradox, which the commercial approach is able to avoid. Here, the money at the end is allowed to grow by contributing to each individual’s increased livelihood, thereby indirectly re-funding the initiative as they make improvements to their own lives.
PROJECTION: THE POTENTIAL OF COMMERCIAL-BASED PROGRAMS
The market-based emphasis of improvement programs in the Mercato makes the attention to its
small-scale interactions a necessity. Improvement programs that deal only with housing can get lost on large-scale initiatives that gloss over actual localized issues. A market focus, with its measurable economic activity, is easier to match. Because there is an attention to the existing financial conditions in this kind of initiative, there is an inherent requirement to understand and not upset the intricate networks that already exist. The Mercato program takes into account the micro time and space scales discussed above by recognizing the daily practices of constant trade of the vendors and buyers in stalls and through the streets of the district. Organizations that get involved are thus able to build on the infrastructure and momentum that already exists in the area, making results easier to achieve than when starting development from scratch.
By focusing on the infrastructure that will allow the vendors to take the condition of the market
into their own hands, new developments, both within the Addis Ababa Mercato and elsewhere, can remain context-generative. By working with a series of small-scale improvements, projects can contract and expand as each locality dictates (for example, where areas of higher density already exist, the attention to the infrastructural improvements can increase in concentration). This micro but expansive attention allows the inhabitants and vendors to make their own benefits from the new system—thus generating their own conditions from it. When things like sanitation systems and storage mechanisms in the market are improved, it is easier for vendors and potential to access, stock, and maintain the selling stalls. With this comes the potential for increased income from the goods they sell. Residents can take this and then make their own updates to their housing or other systems in their neighborhoods. These secondary benefits result from the one initial investment, and can last for several years; yet, they do not require any further funding.
This differs from the context-produced situations that arise in many housing development programs.
Because the context of these is either produced all at once (as in the development of entire buildings or neighborhoods), or requires continued monetary investment but does not provide a self-generating financial source (as in housing renovation projects), these projects often stagnate and do not achieve their long-term goals. There is no internal identity or locality produced, because the environment, or context, is external to the actual conditions the housing is trying to address.
The programs that work with markets do not have to be large in scale to be effective. Solutions could
be as simple as providing stable tables or single-plane roof structures. [Figure 30]
Figure 30: Projective Analysis
CONCLUSION When dealing with designing improvements to any informal settlement, it is important that some programs look beyond housing to the actual commercial structures the informal residents have created. These are a vital part of the informal community and the whole city, and are often the only places where residents can provide a livelihood for themselves. The commercial areas have the potential to generate a higher quality environment within the context of the neighborhoods, yet they are often not included in slum upgrading programs. By targeting a network of existing economic activity rather than living conditions, these improvements can have a larger reach with an initial investment that does not need continued financial support. In this system, the financial support will eventually come from the dwellers themselves, thus avoiding the humanitarian paradox in which residents become dependent on organizations for their continued livelihoods. This approach also allows the complex relationships formed between vendors, buyers, and residents within the area to remain intact. This is perhaps one of the most significant strengths of an informal environment, and its vitality is necessary or future success of the area.
1
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46
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Appendix A
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