With Addis Ababa struggling to cope with housing demand, Ethiopia’s government wants to bring urbanisation to the countryside – but the model town of Buranest has had mixed fortunes
By Tom Gardner
BURANEST, Ethiopia, Nov 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A group of shepherds amble slowly down the main thoroughfare of Buranest, a tiny village in a far-flung corner of northern Ethiopia.
The town square lies empty, as does the school, while sheep and cows graze peacefully in the overgrown grass.
Buranest is a model town, a “real life experiment” that a team of Ethiopian and European urban planners hope can provide crucial lessons for the country’s future.
Founded in 2010 by Franz Oswald of Nestown Group and experts from ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, the nascent town is a paragon of sustainability.
It features self-built homes that harvest rainwater, workshops for light industry and craft, local eucalyptus trees to supply wood for building, and irrigated fields for growing crops.
But for seven years Buranest struggled.
Its model homes are still unoccupied, and local farmers remain suspicious.
“At the beginning most locals did not like the idea,” Mestawet Libokemkem, project coordinator from the local government, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “They feared their land would be taken away from them.”
Urbanisation, and the task of bring jobs and infrastructure to the countryside, is central to the government’s future agenda.
Ethiopia’s urbanisation rate is estimated to be between 4 and 6 percent per year, while the population of the capital, Addis Ababa, is expected to double to more than 8 million over the course of the next decade.
FARMERS SUSPICIOUS
“When we started we thought we could change the world with our plans,” said Fasil Giorghis, an architect based in Addis Ababa and a lead researcher on the Buranest project. “But the farmers are very suspicious, very sceptical.”
Buranest, in the northern Amhara region, is now gradually coming alive. But its past troubles have added significance as a new plan to build 8,000 new towns across the country, gathers momentum.
Whether this dream can become reality depends on whether the kind of problems faced by Buranest can be successfully overcome.
Farmers stroll down the new road of Buranest, Ethiopia, on November 1 2017. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Tom Gardner
Relentless growth is putting enormous pressure on Addis Ababa’s creaking infrastructure, with an estimated half a million homes needed to meet demand and as much as 80 percent of residents living in slums, according to UN-Habitat, the United Nation’s agency in charge of sustainable urban development.
Efforts to expand Addis Ababa, which resulted in the displacement of farmers from its surrounding area, sparked anti-government protests in 2014, culminating in the imposition of a nine-month state-of-emergency last year.
Ethiopia’s government, which came to power in 1991 after more than a decade of civil war, has long sought to manage such pressures by curbing the flow of people from the countryside to the capital.
State ownership of land, for instance, makes it difficult to sell family plots and makes relocating to the city harder.
URBANISING THE COUNTRYSIDE
The plan to build 8,000 small towns is the latest manifestation of these efforts, reflecting a desire to keep people in the countryside “by bringing urbanisation to them”, said Dirk Donath of the University of Weimar in Germany.
Donath is part of a team developing the project in partnership with the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC).
The project, known as Rural-to-Urban Transformation, is the brainchild of Tsedeke Woldu, a wealthy Ethiopian businessman and housing developer, and Bereket Simon, an influential Ethiopian politician and former policy advisor to the prime minister.
It takes inspiration from a 2015 government growth and transformation plan, which included planning 8,000 “rural-development centres” by 2020.
“In the past we were very much focused on promoting agriculture,” said Yinager Dessie, minister of national planning and one of the authors of the plan. “But now we want to have more towns all across the country.”
A chalk blackboard in an empty workshop in the new model town of Buranest, Ethiopia, on November 1 2017. Thomson Reuters Foundation/Tom Gardner
Each village, or “rural development centre”, will be provided with a school, health centre, housing, and government offices.
Farmers will be encouraged to migrate from the surrounding area to take up jobs in light industry, urban agriculture and construction, among others.
In Ethiopia, a town must have a population of more than 2,000 people, and more than 50 percent of the population must earn a living from something other than agriculture, in order to claim urban infrastructure and services from the regional government.
This threshold will soon be lowered to 500 people to help jumpstart the urbanisation process, according to Zegeye Cherenet, an Ethiopian urban planner at the EiABC.
Woldu, the businessman, hopes to start work on 13 pilot towns across the country in early 2018, mostly with his own finances.
“I want to transform them from backwards villages into modern towns,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
CHEQUERED HISTORY
But the problems encountered by Buranest’s founders are expected in these towns, too.
“We have learnt a lot from Buranest,” said Cherenet. “It was a laboratory. And we learnt that the most difficult part of this kind of campaign is mobilizing people to live in it.”
“People are very averse to this,” said Woldu. “They are definitely suspicious. They say things like: ‘they wouldn’t come all the way here if it wasn’t for our land’.”
In Buranest, local farmers believed communal grazing land would be used for one of the many horticulture businesses that have sprung up across Ethiopia over the past decade.
Like many in the Horn of Africa country, they have been scarred by its chequered history of forced resettlement and so-called “villagisation”.
Ethiopians endured failed attempts to resettle millions in collectivized villages under the communist regime known as the Derg, in power from 1974 until 1991.
The current government, led by the Ethiopia People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), launched its own resettlement scheme in 2010.
It moved tens of thousands people in the western Gambella region into purpose-built villages before closing the programme in 2013 following criticism by rights groups.
More recently, the outbreak of mass protests against large-scale land acquisitions and the expansion of Addis Ababa has forced the government to tread more cautiously on issues concerning land.
“The problem is when we create urban centres we have to take land and pay compensation to the farmers,” said Dessie, the minister. “Expansion will definitely take a lot of land – and these days farmers ask for a lot of compensation.”
Despite the obstacles, local authorities are currently selecting poor farmers from the surrounding area to live in Buranest’s model houses, more of which are now under construction.
Over 50 farmers have come together to form a housing co-operative and are receiving bank credit to start building their own.
The school should soon be operational, too, according to Giorghis, and new residents have recently arrived in the area and set up shops along the main road, anticipating further expansion of the town.
“The farmers have changed their attitude,” said Libokemkem, the project coordinator. (Reporting by Tom Gardner, Editing by Astrid Zweynert @azweynert. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
No comments:
Post a Comment