Investment
The corridor and the kiosk
Addis Ababa is rebuilding its streets as public architecture. The test is whether the people who earned a living on them are still there afterwards.
9 min readYonas Abera
Corridor development treats a street as one project: pavement, drainage, lighting, planting and frontage delivered together instead of as sequential excavations of the same asphalt.
The results are visible — continuous walkable pavement in a city that had very little of it, and drainage that survives the summer rains.
Who the street belongs to
Streets in Addis Ababa are also workplaces: kiosks, shoe-shiners, fruit sellers, mechanics. A rebuild that does not plan for that economy removes it, and the city loses both livelihoods and the street life the design was meant to encourage.
- Designated trading bays within the new pavement profile
- Relocation with tenure rather than displacement
- Documentation of heritage fabric before demolition
- Maintenance budgets committed for the decade after ribbon-cutting
A capital is judged by its pavements before its towers — and by whether the people who were on those pavements last year are on them now.
