Streetlife, marginality and development in urban Ethiopia

Project Lead: Marco Di Nunzio

This project, now a book, The Act of Living, published with Cornell University Press, challenged dominant narratives on Africa’s economic growth and urban development. Specifically, it explored this in Ethiopia, a country that had been widely proclaimed a paradigmatic African success story. Grounded in eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, this project narrated economic growth through the eyes of men and women involved in low-wage labour and the informal and illegal street economy. It documented how economic growth delivered visions of urban abundance, embodied by high-rise glass-and-steel architecture, yet failed to serve the aspirations of continuous improvement of those making do at the bottom of urban society.

The Act of Living showed that the unfulfilled promise of development was due not only to the unequal distribution of benefits of economic growth but resulted from how development policies targeting the urban poor made pervasive forms of political control and economic oppression the terms of poor people’s integration into wider society. In these circumstances, the modes of existence elaborated by the book’s protagonists to endure their condition of marginality rarely challenged the status quo. Yet they raised moral and existential concerns about open-endedness and claims about respect, chance, time and action that are incommensurable with the notions of development imposed by the state and international development organisations. By documenting these tensions during a time of economic growth, this project argued that poor people’s quests for open-endedness and claims of incommensurability can constitute the grounds on which to imagine alternative urban futures.

Research for this project was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Wolfson College and All Souls’ College at the University of Oxford.