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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Who’s urban? Contested (Sub-)Urbanity in the Eritrean capital Asmara
| Panel |
43. Making the African Suburbia
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| Paper ID | 570 |
| Author(s) |
Treiber, Magnus
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | When Mussolini declared race-segregation for Italy’s then colony Eritrea, its representative urban centre, Asmara, became partially closed to Eritrean natives, who’s living quarters were restricted to the narrow streets of Geza Berhanu or Aba Shawl, so-called ‘native quarters’. Urban planning reserved the wide, spacious and green neighbourhoods to representatives of the colonial administration and military. Soon after the Italian defeat in 1941 native Eritreans took over the urban colonial infrastructure and integrated Italian cultural imports like street cafés, Italian cuisine and fashion into an evolving urban life-style. Informal moral and aesthetic rules, developed since, still hinder people from poor suburbs to enter the Asmara’s representative public space, especially the city’s main boulevard Godena Harnet/Liberty Avenue. Plots and housing facilities in the newly constructed outskirts of Eritrea’s fast growing capital are most often sold to the country’s diaspora abroad, able to pay in foreign currency. People, who live in these wealthy but isolated neighbourhoods, are more excluded from the city’s daily life by the lack of public transport than by material requirements and missing aesthetic knowledge. This presentation will try to show different milieus grouped around today’s Asmara, their differing perceptions of the city, their possibilities to participate and the typical spatial areas they enter – and give an insight into a polyphone discourse on contested (sub-)urbanity. |
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