2025 Theses Master's

Image-making for a Nation: Understanding the tethered trajectories of the Addis Ababa City Corridor Project, foreign influence, and heritage

Assayehgen, Atsede Adinew

This research examines the historical construction and ongoing influence of foreign financial inflows, labor importation, and knowledge transfer on the development practices and aesthetic identity of Addis Ababa. It explores how multi-form foreign investment has been leveraged as part of a modernist urban development agenda that doubles as a nation- and image-building strategy. Such a dynamic mimics the hierarchical patterns of colonialism, despite Ethiopiaís historical resistance to formal colonization, through gradual displacement of indigenous urban vernaculars, and socio-spatial identities that are tethered to place and cultivated over generations.

Focusing on the 21st century China-Ethiopia relationship, the study discusses how Chinese infrastructural investments have shaped Addis Ababaís contemporary urban landscape, building upon a historical lineage of Italian, British, and French interventions. The Addis Ababa City Corridor Development Project (CDP) serves as the central case study, revealing how the pursuit of modernity through large-scale development has reproduced an uneven and dependent relationship, where Ethiopian development practices have now internalized neocolonial dynamics and trace.

In the Piassa neighborhood, one of the first neighborhoods to be overturned for the Corridor Project, this research examines the socio-spatial impacts of Phase 1 of the Project ñ including widespread displacement and erasure of cultural and architectural heritage. Mobilizing tezeta as a conceptual framework ñ an Ethiopian musical and linguistic expression of memory and longing ñ this research documents resident and diasporic reflections on loss, attachment, and place. Further evaluating how the sterilization of Piassaís urban fabric has disrupted collective memory and community identity.

By bridging an analysis of foreign influence with lived experiences connected to heritage loss, this research critically assesses who the Corridor Project truly aims to serve and interrogates the consequences of modernization pursued under the banner of national progress and international recognition.