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Ethiopia: 'If It is an Open Space, Build It,' Bulldozing Open Spaces

B. Mzegebu

21 December 2007

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Addis Ababa — The name is Addis Ababa. It conjures up in one's mind the yellow flowers that bloom in abundance at the end of every rainy season which also coincides with the start of the New Year. That was true then. Now thanks to urbanization gone extreme; those flowers are so marginal to the city's landscape that you have to search all over to get a glimpse of.

In 2005, 50 city leaders of countries stretching from Dakar to Delhi, from Moscow to Manila agreed to come up with a road map for a bold, new coarse to a renewal of the urban environment: to reduce waste and pollution, ease traffic congestion; and most of all to ensure accessible public parks or recreational open spaces within a third of a mile of every city resident.

I have no idea if our capital city or any of the major towns in Ethiopia were signatories to that declaration or if any delegate even attended it. If the proposal materialized, it meant that every citizen anywhere within a city would come across a park or open recreational space by only traveling a mere quarter of a mile or roughly a kilometer, in any direction.

If you were to undertake a trip from Bole to Meskel Square here in Addis, you would, by the above assumption, encounter 3 or more parks or open spaces for your lingering pleasure. If you made that journey by foot, what in reality you would encounter are not any parks but stumbling blocks of all types. Unfinished pedestrian walkways, abandoned construction detritus, illegally parked cars straddling the pavements and so forth.

You might decide to continue on your amble straight ahead. In that case, you are bound to reach at the national stadium. Adjacent to it there used to be an open space, sort of a mini-stadium. Young people, most likely aspiring footballers played their football on it. There could be seen a good number of youthful spectators too. Now that is proving a goner.

At that same spot, a construction goes on at hectic speed. Whatever the final edifice that will materialize in the end, there will not be an open space anymore. Those aspiring footballers will have to play on streets and on makeshift fields on roads.

If you continue your walk and press ahead in the direction of the Africa Hall, you surely will come face to face with the best kept park in town. It is not your run-of-the-mill parks. It has been under locks for a couple or so years now. So far only VIPs and athletes have been inside it very briefly.

For all I know parks and open spaces were meant to sit at, linger in and explore, not just looked at from the outside. You don't shop window parks. But let us give the owners of the park the benefit of the doubt and just say they still have some matters to tidy up before they open it up to the general public.

Third World emerging cities like Addis Ababa and their planners have the opportunity to learn and perhaps act wiser than those who went before. Since serious construction has been going for some years in the city, Addis has still some time but not all the time to avoid indiscriminately chasing every open space and converting them into cement and concrete.

Before long in the future, there will be strong need for breathing space in overcrowded cities. There are studies and research findings elsewhere that show those kinds of places already act as therapy to the mass of people who toil in cities jostling with million others everyday.

As the National Geographic of October 2006 succinctly put it," What then should be the goal of city planners? A park near every doorstep where people can gather and gain a healthy dose of that remedy Henry David Thoreau said we can never have enough of: nature." Perhaps in our case, we should replace the word city 'planners' with city policy makers. If there are in place policies that favor green recreational spots, planners will not stand in the way, for sure.

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