The lonely flower: Addis Ababa’s urban redevelopment in perspective

Visiting Ethiopia in the mid-nineteenth century, the British traveller Charles Johnston described how the Kingdom of Shewa likened itself to the ember-orange flower of the Carthamus tinctorius, surrounded by thorns as it was by enemies. Thus, when the expansionist kingdom established its imperial capital in 1886 under Emperor Menelik II, its co-founder, Empress Taytu Betul, may have wished to implant in its name – Addis Ababa, literally ‘new flower’ – a deeply symbolic meaning. Since then, the city has often been seen as exceptional, distinct from the rest of Ethiopia: a politically cultivated garden within a wider, and often turbulent terrain. Ethiopia’s successive governments – from the imperial state, through the Derg, to the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, and the Prosperity Party (PP) since 2019 – have long imposed their visions on both the political landscape and the built environment of the capital.

This idea persists. Today, Addis Ababa is being dug up and reshaped through monumental urban development projects – corridor developments, riverside regeneration schemes, and transport expansions. The mayor of Addis Ababa, Adanech Abebe, seeks to beautify, interlink, and economically transform the rapidly growing city, whose population may now be approaching 6.5 million, although the true figure remains uncertain. Amid the cement-dust haze of construction, however, it is often hard to see what lies beyond the capital. Rural highlands face agricultural stagnation. The country is under demographic strain from one of Africa’s fastest-growing populations. Ongoing conflicts continue to hinder development across several regions. These include the Oromo Liberation Army insurgency in Oromia, the Fano insurgencies in Amhara, fragile ceasefire tensions following the war in Tigray, and intercommunal violence in the Omo Valley.

At face value, Addis Ababa appears walled off – politically, economically, and spatially – from the rest of the country, with development concentrated there largely because it is far more difficult, if not impossible, to pursue at scale under conditions of insecurity elsewhere. But does such ‘Addis Ababan exceptionalism’ reflect a reality, or rather function as a carefully maintained narrative that conceals structural tensions embedded, like a stubborn weed, at the city’s core? Addis Ababa’s ongoing physical transformation may, in fact, be inseparable from wider security dynamics across Ethiopia: not a divergence from them, but an urban expression of the same political anxieties, state ambitions, and contested futures.

The architecture of anxiety

Upon its foundation as the capital of the Kingdom of Shewa, Addis Ababa was little different from other imperial Ethiopian settlements: a hilltop military encampment, projecting authority outward while harbouring insecurity within. The French traveller Jules Borelli noted Emperor Menelik II’s persistent fear that the surrounding Oromo communities, ‘in a confusion caused by some incident, might seize the guébi [royal palace]’. The so-called ‘Taytu Plan’, associated with Empress Taytu Betul, thus sought to defensively network the city’s hills, drawing on the surveillance capacity of the medieval Ethiopian royal camp, the te’ynt – derived from the Amharic word for ‘eye’. This early moment marked the beginning of an enduring tradition of urban planning as a spatial response to perceived threat.

It was not until Ethiopia’s sovereignty was decisively asserted following the Battle of Adwa, however, that more self-conscious efforts emerged to cultivate Addis Ababa into a recognisably ‘modern’ capital. Banks, hotels, paved roads, and the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway rapidly appeared in the decades preceding the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-41).

The legacy of Fascist Italy’s urban masterplans for Addis Ababa lies less in their execution than in their ambition. The unfulfilled proposals of modernist architects such as Le Corbusier extended Empress Taytu’s earlier preoccupation with defence and observation, envisioning a rigidly zoned and racially segregated capital, with military command positioned at its core. These plans, however, were abruptly curtailed when Italian forces were defeated by a combined Ethiopian and British campaign in 1941, restoring imperial rule.

Under the restored empire of Haile Selassie I, ‘Addis Ababa’ and ‘Ethiopia’ became increasingly conflated. The capital came to stand in for the nation itself, often to the neglect of its vast and diverse peripheries. Positioned as a leader in Africa, the city was adorned with modernist landmarks that projected Ethiopia’s international stature and alignment with Western powers. Yet beneath this façade, reports of famine, rural inequality, and peasant hardship filtered into the capital, scattering discontent like seeds and giving rise to the Ethiopian ‘Student Movement’ between the mid-1960s and 1974.

As Addis Ababa expanded, its urban core was reconfigured in 1965 under a French masterplan modelled on Champs-Élysées in Paris. That boulevard had itself been reshaped in the nineteenth century by Georges-Eugène Haussmann as much for its defensibility against insurrection as for its aesthetic grandeur. Whether or not such considerations explicitly guided Haile Selassie’s planners, the implication is difficult to ignore: modernisation and control were deeply intertwined. Revolution, in any case, proved unavoidable, and the emperor was overthrown by the Marxist-Leninist military junta known as the Derg in 1974.

While consolidating power, the Derg confronted urban resistance from groups such as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party within Addis Ababa. Following an attempted assassination of its leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the regime unleashed the Red Terror (1976–78), executing thousands of suspected opponents. The kebele system, introduced in 1975, had already subdivided the capital into tightly governed administrative units, rendering neighbourhoods ‘legible’, and therefore controllable, to the state. Urban planning and intelligence gathering thus converged into a single governing logic: to fragment, monitor, and dominate urban space.

Yet the decisive challenge to the Derg ultimately emerged from beyond the capital. Across Ethiopia’s regions, insurgent movements, often organised along ethnic lines, demanded autonomy or outright independence. In 1991, after years of protracted conflict, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) entered Addis Ababa and overthrew the regime, instituting a federal system that restructured Ethiopia along ethno-linguistic lines and granted regional states formal self-governing powers.

Viewing poverty itself as a latent security risk, the EPRDF prioritised agricultural transformation, directing resources toward smallholder farmers and achieving notable early gains. Urban constituencies, by contrast, were largely taken for granted, an assumption that proved costly. In the 2005 general election, the ruling coalition suffered a significant loss of support in Addis Ababa, prompting a crackdown on opposition groups and an expansion of state surveillance apparatuses such as the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) and the Information Network Security Agency (INSA).

Once again, urban development and security strategy reinforced one another. The Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP), launched in the wake of the election, reshaped the city’s periphery with vast condominium complexes. These orderly, state-planned units contrasted with informal settlements and proved far easier to monitor. As Ethiopia’s agricultural growth slowed in the 2010s, rural migrants with sufficient means were absorbed into these developments, while residents of inner-city slums were displaced or relocated, further extending the state’s spatial reach.

This outward expansion of the capital carried profound political consequences. When the Addis Ababa Masterplan – which aimed to expand the city deep into the surrounding Oromia region – was published in January 2014, longstanding tensions over territorial rights and political marginalisation were renewed, both within and around the capital. One hundred and twenty-eight years after Borelli recorded Emperor Menelik’s fear of the Oromo communities surrounding his capital, protesters entered Addis Ababa, and similar demonstrations erupted across other cities. Amid this crisis, the EPRDF wilted, enabling Abiy Ahmed’s rise to power and the formation of the Prosperity Party in 2019.

In retrospect, Addis Ababa’s physical evolution has consistently been shaped by layered anxieties – emanating from international pressures, nationwide contestations, and tensions embedded within the capital itself. The city’s built environment, far from neutral, emerges as both a product of these insecurities, a landscape where power is defended and its loss quietly feared.

Addis Ababa under the Prosperity Party

After a flower fades in winter, a new one rises from the same soil. The Prosperity Party’s urban projects in Addis Ababa represent less a rupture with the capital’s previous governance than a continuity that adapts to new political and technological conditions.

Following the killing of the popular Oromo singer Hachalu Hundessa, protests returned to Addis Ababa on 30 June 2020. Demonstrators arrived in the city centre from surrounding towns, collapsing, if only temporarily, the spatial boundary between capital and periphery. Looting, vandalism, and episodes of ethnically charged violence followed. The government responded with forceful policing measures across Addis Ababa and the Oromia Region. Checkpoints and roadblocks – forms of temporary physical urban modification – were reinforced by a nationwide internet shutdown, a digital security tactic normalised under the EPRDF.

These protests encapsulated broader tensions fuelling conflict across Ethiopia, with Addis Ababa acting as one of their most visible climaxes. Among them is the ongoing insurgency of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). When the government granted amnesty to the Oromo Liberation Front, a movement with roots in the late socialist period, its armed faction, the Oromo Liberation Army, refused to integrate and instead reconstituted itself as an insurgent force.

Claiming to address historical grievances against the centralising state associated with Addis Ababa, the OLA has operated across Oromia and, at times, in neighbouring regions. It has been repeatedly accused of targeting non-Oromo civilians, particularly Amhara communities. These dynamics have, in turn, fuelled an emergent ethnonationalist mobilisation among Amharas, including the militia movement known as Fano, which the Prosperity Party now confronts in the Amhara Region – a region where militarisation is increasingly displacing developmental priorities.

These insurgencies are predominantly rural, yet they are intimately connected to urban dynamics. They reflect both Ethiopia’s rapid demographic expansion and the stalling of the EPRDF’s earlier agricultural growth model. Regional security forces and insurgent groups alike have absorbed young people who might otherwise have migrated into cities such as Addis Ababa. Urban demographic pressure and rural insurgency, therefore, emerge not as separate phenomena, but as interlinked expressions of the same underlying cause.

Within Addis Ababa, these tensions manifest in increasingly ethnicised debates over access to land, governance, and resources. Oromia asserts a constitutionally enshrined but ambiguously defined ‘special interest’ in the capital, while Amharic-speaking elites have historically dominated its administrative and cultural institutions. Competing historical narratives further animate these claims. Oromo nationalists invoke ‘Finfinnee’, the pre-imperial Oromo name for the area, whereas some Amhara narratives accentuate its association with the medieval Christian settlement of Berara. The city thus becomes not merely a political centre, but a contested symbolic landscape.

High-profile projects such as Unity Park and the Adwa Victory Memorial Museum reflect Abiy Ahmed’s attempt to popularise his principle of medemer (‘synergy’), a philosophy aimed at transcending ethnic division through unity and shared development. These projects seek to inscribe a unifying national narrative into the city’s physical environment.

The Prosperity Party’s urban construction agenda should therefore be understood not merely as a series of internationally self-conscious, aestheticised ‘vanity projects’, as some critics suggest, but also as an indirect strategy of stabilisation. Here, the insights of James C. Scott are instructive: top-down planners often conflate visual order with substantive security. The significant financial cost of Addis Ababa’s transformation has prompted criticism of ‘urban makeovers [masquerading] as development’, while the displacement of lower-income residents has reinforced perceptions of a city characterised by ‘dual faces’: ordered and modern on the surface, yet socially fractured beneath.

At the same time, initiatives such as the Corridor Development Project, an ambitious overhaul of the capital’s transport infrastructure, carry clear economic objectives. By enhancing connectivity between peripheral condominium districts and commercial centres, the project aims to facilitate labour mobility thereby boosting formal sector participation. With similar corridor-style developments reportedly underway in dozens of secondary cities, Ethiopia’s most significant structural divide may be less a simple Addis Ababa–periphery dichotomy than an increasingly more pronounced urban–rural cleavage. In this light, the cultivation of the Prosperity Party’s very own young, urban, and economically integrated population may also function as a long-term political strategy.

Infrastructure expansion, however, has further implications. Improved road networks and spatial integration also enable faster deployment of security forces in times of crisis. During the war between the federal government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (2020–2022), TPLF forces advanced to within roughly eighty-five miles of Addis Ababa, prompting widespread concern that the capital itself might be threatened. Concurrently, urban intelligence operations intensified, with authorities detaining individuals suspected of sympathising with the TPLF.

Whether the city’s defences would have faltered as the Derg’s did in 1991 is impossible to know, as the TPLF were subsequently repelled northwards towards Tigray. What is clearer is that the episode underlined the city’s strategic vulnerability and likely looms large in the Prosperity Party’s policy thinking. The future expansion of both physical infrastructure and digital surveillance systems appears not only plausible, but probable, as the state seeks to pre-empt future threats.

As of early 2026, Mayor Adanech Abebe described the Corridor Development Project as having secured ‘peace and security in our city’. However, in light of reports of illegal assault weapon shipments into the capital and intensified checkpoint inspections, her claims raise the question of whether Addis Ababa’s physical redevelopment reflects durable stability or a calm maintained through continuous intervention.

The limits of the garden

Try as a gardener might to prune, clip, and contour their land, weeds and wind-scattered seeds ultimately shape its form. Boundaries, in this sense, are often imagined, tools of psychological reassurance rather than fixed realities. The notion of ‘Addis Ababan exceptionalism’ is therefore, at least in part, illusory. The capital cannot detach itself from the political, economic, and social dynamics of the country that surrounds it.

Across its roughly 140-year history, Addis Ababa’s rulers have continually renegotiated the city’s relationship with the wider Ethiopian society. These negotiations are inscribed not only in its architecture and infrastructure, but increasingly in its digital and surveillance systems. The city’s slow, multifaceted evolution should be seen not as a self-contained project but as part of a larger political ecology, where the so-called centre and distant peripheries are intimately linked, each shaping and sustaining the other.

Today, stagnation in rural Ethiopia is intensifying pressure on urban labour markets, housing, and services. At the same time, conflicts rooted in land scarcity, identity, and governance are increasingly reverberating within the capital. Debates over history, belonging, and entitlement cross-pollinate between multiple centres and peripheries, dissolving any clear boundary between them.

Whether the Prosperity Party’s urban development strategy can mitigate these tensions, and thereby secure Addis Ababa, remains uncertain. What seems more evident is that a durable resolution is unlikely to emerge without addressing the structural conditions beyond the capital – rural underdevelopment, demographic strain, and unresolved political grievances. Without such a shift, the ‘new flower’ may continue to bloom, but in soil that remains fundamentally unsettled.

• Editorial Note: This article has been published anonymously to protect the safety and privacy of the author.