PIASSA, AN URBAN WOUND AT THE HEART OF ADDIS

 PIASSA, FERITA URBANA NEL CUORE DI ADDIS

Chronicles from Addis Ababa before and after the fracture

by Ciro Scuotto

Addis Ababa, 2019.

I arrived in Piassa in 2019 with few certainties and only one real guide: Marco Di Nunzio, a friend I met at the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” Marco comes from Corso Garibaldi. From time to time we still manage to keep in touch—far too rarely, unfortunately, as happens to those who grow up, live, and move; people are constantly on the move. Today he is Associate Professor in Urban Anthropology at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom).

Marco has studied for years the urban life of Addis Ababa, its street economies, ways of dwelling, and inequalities. He earned a PhD at Oxford and is the author of The Act of Living.

It is he who introduces me to the soul of the neighborhood and its deepest identity: Arada.

Before my arrival, Marco gives me a few but precise pointers.
He points out a place: an old pastry shop called Enrico, still operating today after more than sixty years.

I discover that Enrico was an Italian who arrived here many years ago, the founder of that pastry workshop.
He taught everything he knew to an Ethiopian apprentice, and that shop has remained alive to this day.

A small, silent legacy, surviving time, colonialism, and broken promises.

It is at Enrico’s that my Piassa begins—a name that comes from the Italian word piazza: colonialism has left consequences even at the linguistic level.

There is also another neighborhood, Kazanchis, whose name derives from a phonetic Africanization of Casa INCIS. When I learned this, a spontaneous smile came to my face: I immediately thought of the INCIS housing estate in Ponticelli.

Kazanchis is already documented in the 1950s as a neighborhood that arose around a large building called Casa INCIS, later turned into a military headquarters, international offices, and finally a secret detention center during the Menghistu regime.

Despite all this, today it is in better shape than the one in Ponticelli.

In the Piassa neighborhood, the historic heart of the Arada district, Africa was supposed to become modern.

Here Fascist Italy built its urban laboratory: wide avenues, rationalist buildings, severe architectures that promised order, progress, and the future.

Piassa was meant to be “ahead of everything else.”

And for decades it truly was: an economic center, an urban showcase, a point of reference for the Ethiopian capital.

When I arrived in 2019, Piassa was still recognizable, but already fractured.

The structures were standing, but tired. Buildings had flaking skin, bent balconies, blackened façades. Between walls that once spoke of progress, tin shacks, informal vendors, and improvised dormitories were growing.

Arada is not just the name of a neighborhood: it is a declaration.

It means “I am from Arada, I am Arada”—and in Neapolitan it could be translated as: scugnizzo, street-smart, a child of the streets.

To be Arada means learning how to move among unwritten rules, surviving in a city that runs faster than its promises.

But Piassa did not simply become poor.

It became dangerous.
Abandoned.
Distressing.

Colonial futurism—which was supposed to bring order—left behind an urban ruin that today is perceived as one of the most fragile and violent areas of the capital. The very architectures meant to build tomorrow have become the container of a present that no one wants to look at anymore.

In 2019 I photographed all of this without knowing that I was documenting the last Addis before the fracture.

I kept my photographs in a drawer for six years. I thought they were just memories. Instead, they were the last image of a city that no longer exists.

Then the rest arrived.

The war in Tigray, the humanitarian crisis, political closure, international isolation, fear. Ethiopia entered a new and harsher season, and Addis Ababa began to change its face.

In 2024, the historic heart of Piassa was profoundly transformed by a major urban development program linked to the so-called Corridor Development Project and other infrastructural interventions promoted by the government of Abiy Ahmed.

A significant part of the neighborhood was demolished to make way for new road arteries, urban corridors, and public spaces. City authorities acknowledged that more than 11,000 residents were displaced from their homes and relocated to peripheral areas that were often incomplete or inadequately serviced.

According to local reports and urban heritage observers, dozens of historic buildings in Piassa were erased or severely compromised, marking an irreversible loss for the architectural and social memory of the capital.

A second fracture descended upon Piassa—silent and irreversible: modernization.

Entire neighborhoods were swept away to make room for road corridors, artificial squares, showcase parks, and boulevards designed for a global city that Addis is not yet.

Homes, shops, markets, cafés, workshops, gathering places disappeared in a matter of months.

Families were relocated far away.

Those who remained live among construction sites, metal fences, and dust.

Piassa was not merely “redeveloped”:
it was emptied.

The streets I photographed in 2019 no longer exist as I remembered them.

In their place are new squares—wide, clean, but without memory.

The life that made Piassa an urban heart has been pushed to the margins.

Today Piassa is a stage set.

It is a rebuilt city, but without its people.

It is a future that advances by erasing the present that made it possible.

The neighborhood that was meant to represent modernity has become the symbol of an imposed, top-down modernization that does not protect those who actually live the city.

Piassa today is no longer just a place.

It is an urban wound.

It is proof that a city can be destroyed twice:
the first time by colonialism,
the second by development without memory.

And so the question remains open:
what remains of a city when the future that was promised to it dies before arriving—and the new one erases even what was left?

In 2019, I photographed precisely that fragile moment.

When the future was already collapsing,
but no one had yet called it by its name.

My favorite photograph is this one.

A group of men sitting outside a bar.

One of them wears an elegant suit, a tie, a hat, sunglasses. He sits composed, holding a beer, as if he were outside a bar in Naples.

It could be Forcella, the Vasto, Gianturco—and instead it is Addis Ababa, it was Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Today, who knows.