Merkato, Ethiopia. Merkato is the busiest place I know. If economy is defined as the flow of goods and services than this is an extreme example. Within an area of not more than a square kilometre there are hundreds of thousands of people doing business. Small, very small business, of course, like carrying bags, cleaning shoes, guarding goods, pushing carts, disassembling scrap, cooking food, offering tea, guiding trucks, moving busses, packing shipments, offering blessings, sending curses, begging. In Merkato you can get everything, from food to cars to weapons. It is the heart of Addis Ababa, and the central market place for the Horn of Africa.
Merkato is a paradoxical place. It was built in the late thirties under the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. But whereas usually the colonial regimes in Africa left the indigenous settlements alone and built a new town – often with a clean and rational street grid – for themselves, in Addis Ababa it was the other way around. The Italian moved into the existing Ethiopian settlement and renamed it as Piazza, and resettled the Ethiopian population to a new area called Merkato. Thus this large market area has grown from a rational street grid, and over the years developed into a hub for all kinds of activities in the region. But it also grew to a point where it was about to get choked.
We were asked to develop a local development plan for Merkato, and quickly realised that the bigger players in this process were quite stuck in clichés. While the Ethopian government in its usual hubris wanted to see ten-storey high towers to make Merkato look like an image of modernisation, the German development agency was rather into protecting the status quo and make it look like a Western image of poor Africa. When asking the merchants and other communal initiatives what they actually wanted it turned out that they had a very clear understanding of what would be a healthy development for the complex sociology and economy of the place and the people.
In order to support the merchants and other members of the Merkato community’s pragmatic standpoint against the wishful thinking of the bigger players we started our work on the local development plan not with the usual large-scale 1:5000 plans, but with drawing small-scale 1:50 sections. In this way we could show people and activities. The sections would reveal small but important spatial divisions. They would show women making butter and selling it from structures, which are more like a shelf than a stall. They would show that storage areas in the back of the blocks are also hostels where many people sleep in, and guard the goods. The sections showed a very fine grain of urbanism. Busyness cannot be mapped with the usual urban planning media. But for a market area busyness is the basis for business, its raison-d`être.