Ethiopia's Urban Transformation: Infrastructure, Mobility, and Authoritarianism (Routledge Contemporary Africa)

This book investigates the ways in which Ethiopia’s urban landscape is being reshaped by an infrastructure boom in megaproject corridors and industrial parks. Drawing on extensive immersive fieldwork, the book considers how citizens negotiate, appropriate, or resist these engineered spaces.Tracing Ethiopia’s recent investments in expressways, logistics corridors and state-built industrial parks, the book documents a fast-changing territorial and urban frontier across Ethiopia’s southern peripheries and the Addis Ababa-Nairobi corridor.Rather than treating infrastructure expansion as a straightforward, top-down process, the study foregrounds the “messy” negotiations that unfold on the ground.By following everyday encounters with roads, industrial zones and mobility regimes, the book shows how infrastructure becomes a key arena through which authority, access to resources and urban futures are organized and contested.Side-stepping binary state-versus-society or plan-versus-practice narra