Violence of Urbanization, Poor Neighbourhoods and Large-Scale Projects: Lessons from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Violence in cities, whether in the North or the South, in most cases is blamed on the 'usual suspects', namely the young people living in poor neighbourhoods. In this article, we a empt to shift this blame to the urbanization process itself. We introduce the concept of 'violence of urbanization', de fined as the impact of the rapid and radical transformation of cities through the introduction of mega-projects into the spatial and social environment. The overall objective of this transformation is modernization (and globalization), but it results in the marginalization of the poorer population. As an example, we present Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, not because social violence is particularly high there (quite the contrary in fact), but because today Addis Ababa's urban spaces are produced by radical urban planning and not by maintaining an inclusive and peaceful urbanity. Some important public spaces in the city have been violently destroyed and then rebuilt, in order to achieve urban modernization (in line with the development of a capital city of the Global South). In the process the poor are forced to move further into the peripheries so that their former habitat may be replaced by 'a suitable environment' to accommodate the neo-globalization of urban Africa. The majority of the new, massive, and rapidly constructed infrastructure projects are financed and contracted by Chinese companies. This phenomenon illustrates a process that strengthens our hypothesis of violence of urbanization: it is just another war against the poor, not a war against poverty. It is one of the hardest but also the most common forms of violence we face today and it is being committed in cities around the world.