Ethiopia's Urban Transformation by Thomas Betschart

Ethiopia's Urban Transformation by Thomas Betschart

This book investigates the ways in which Ethiopia’s urban landscape is being reshaped by an infrastructure boom in megaproject corridors and industrial parks.

Drawing on extensive immersive fieldwork, the book considers how citizens negotiate, appropriate, or resist these engineered spaces. Tracing Ethiopia’s recent investments in expressways, logistics corridors and state-built industrial parks, the book documents a fast-changing territorial and urban frontier across Ethiopia’s southern peripheries and the Addis Ababa–Nairobi corridor. Rather than treating infrastructure expansion as a straightforward, top-down process, the study foregrounds the “messy” negotiations that unfold on the ground. By following everyday encounters with roads, industrial zones and mobility regimes, the book shows how infrastructure becomes a key arena through which authority, access to resources and urban futures are organized and contested. Side-stepping binary state-versus-society or plan-versus-practice narratives, the book illuminates how urban futures are negotiated in concrete, often contradictory, ways during times of heightened political tensions.

This book’s detailed ethnographic insights will be an important read for researchers across the fields of urban studies, human geography, development economics, anthropology, and African studies.

Thomas Betschart is an urban geographer researching infrastructure, mobility and urban transformation. He completed his PhD at the Urban Studies Program, University of Basel, Switzerland. His work examines the political and socio-spatial consequences of large-scale infrastructure development and its implications for urbanization in Ethiopia.