principles of italian colonial urbanism

PRINCIPLES OF ITALIAN COLONIAL URBANISM
DAVID RIFKIND
Florida International University, UNITED STATES
Asmara (Eritrea). Aerial view of city center, c.1937.
Gondar (Ethiopia). Post and Telegraph Office, c.1937-38.
Gondar (Ethiopia). commercial and residential district, c.1936-41.
Throughout the 1930s, cities in Italy and its African colonies were transformed in
response to the fascist regime’s imperial ambitions. In the metropole, these changes were
largely symbolic gestures that included the erection of monuments and the renaming of
streets. In the colonies, however, planners restructured the built environment to embody
imperial policies and goals on many levels. The cities of East Africa, and especially those
of Ethiopia, bear witness to the use of urban design to reconcile the fascist regime’s
demands for ideological representation with the practical needs of everyday life.
Italian planners frequently laid out boulevards that joined a significant new building
representing the fascist empire to an iconic historical structure representing the Abyssinian
empire. Parades on these roads always began at the older site, symbolically reinforcing
the transfer of imperial power. A similar appropriation of historic structures appears in
the spaces set aside for “adunate” (political rallies) outside the embattled walls of royal
castles or fortresses, where the assembled masses symbolically re-enacted the seizure of
Italy’s African possessions. Italian urban designers carefully used zoning and landscape
to further construct social identities by segregating colonial cities according to race,
religion and class. Yet evidence increasingly shows that these spaces were not designed
by the well-known architects whose names appear on each city’s master plan, but rather
by engineers and “geometri” working in municipal and regional planning offices at the
direction of military governors and other extraordinary patrons.
Gondar (Ethiopia). Villa in an upper class residential district, c.1937-38.
Jimma (Ethiopia). Post and Telegraph Office, c.1937-38.
Harar (Ethiopia). Mosque and market square, c.1936-40.
shared qualities, including a requirement to represent the Italian regime, a concern with
manifesting social hierarchies, a mandate to enforce racial segregation, a sensitivity to
topography and climate, an interest in historic preservation, and an accommodation of
experimental construction techniques spurred by the restricted availability of conventional
building materials. Equally instructive are the differences between the cities, due to their
varying historical and geographical contexts. This essay identifies the key aspects of
these colonial cities, and situates Italian colonial planning in relation to efforts to organize
and control vast territorial holdings. These cities also demonstrate the diversity of Italian
architecture in Ethiopia, as state, party, institutional and private interests separately sought
an appropriate formal expression for their facilities.
Urban design was a key tool of Italian colonial policy during the occupation of Ethiopia
between 1936 and 1941. Italian urbanism throughout the fascist era illustrates the
disquieting compatibility between progressive planning practices and authoritarian political
regimes. Cities built in Italian-occupied East Africa further demonstrate the extent to which
modern urban design could participate in the coercive project of constructing imperial
identities, both amongst Italian settlers and among African colonial subjects. As case
studies in the design and construction of Ethiopian cities under Italian colonial rule, Harar,
Jimma and Gondar display the themes of identity formation and ideological representation
that animated urbanism in Italy’s African empire.
Tripoli (Libya). Rally in the piazza in front of the restored castle, 1935.
The cities illustrated here serve as particularly good examples of Italian colonial
urbanism’s principles. These cities – Harar, Jimma and Gondar in Ethiopia, as well as
the Eritrean capital of Asmara and the Libyan capital of Tripoli – exhibit a number of
notes:
bibliography
Foundational research on fascist-era Italian urbanism includes Riccardo Mariani, Fascismo e città nuove, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1976; Idem, Le città nuove del periodo
fascista, «Abitare», 169, October 1978, p.76; Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989; and Giorgio Ciucci, Gli Architetti e il fascismo: architettura e città, (1922-1944), Turin, Einaudi, 1989.
Marc Angélil and Dirk Hebel, Cities of Change: Addis Ababa: Transformation Strategies for Urban Territories in the 21st Century. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010.
Milena Batistoni and Gian Paolo Chiari, Old Tracks in the New Flower: A Historical Guide to Addis Ababa. Addis Ababa: Arada Books, 2004.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Italian Colonial Cinema: Agendas and Audiences,” Modern Italy 8, no. 1 (2003), 54–55.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, Italian Colonialism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Getahun Benti, Addis Ababa: Migration and the Making of a Multiethnic Metropolis,1941-1974. Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2007.
Renato Besana, Carlo Fabrizio Carli, Leonardo Devoti, and Luigi Prisco, eds., Metafisica costruita: le città di fondazione degli anni trenta dall’Italia all’Oltremare.
Milan: Touring Editore, 2002.
Alberto Boralevi, “Le città dell’Impero: urbanistica fascista in Etiopia, 1936–1941,” Storia urbana 8 (1979), 65–115.
Lorenzo Cappellini and Paolo Portoghesi, Le città del silenzio: paesaggio, acque e architetture della regione pontina. Latina: L’Argonauta, 1984.
Edward Denison, Guang Yu Ren and Naigzy Gebremedhin, Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City. London: Merrell, 2003.
Mia Fuller, “Building Power: Italian Architecture and Urbanism in Libya and Ethiopia,” in Forms of Dominance. On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial
Enterprise, ed. Nezar AlSayyad. Aldershot: Avebury, 1992, 211–39.
-----, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian Imperialism. New York: Routledge, 2007.
-----, “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Fascist Plans for the Colonial City of Addis Ababa and the Colonizing Suburb of EUR’42,” Journal of Contemporary History
31, no. 2 (1996), 397–418.
Solomon Addis Getahun, A History of the City of Gondar. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006.
Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Fasil Giorghis and Denis Gérard, The City & its Architectural Heritage: Addis Ababa 1886-1941. Addis Ababa: Shama Books, 2007.
Giuliano Gresleri and Pier Giorgio Massaretti, eds. Architettura italiana d’oltremare. Atlante iconografico. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009.
The literature on Italian colonial urbanism includes: Marida Talamona, Libya: an Architectural Workshop, «Rassegna» 14, September, 1992, pp.62-79; Idem, Addis
Abeba capitale dell’impero, «Storia contemporanea», 16, 5-6, 1985, pp.1093-1130; Architettura italiana d’oltremare: 1870-1940, a cura di Giuliano Gresleri, Pier
Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, Venice, Marsilio, 1993; Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad, Routledge, 2007; Idem, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Fascist
Plans for the Colonial City of Addis Ababa and the Colonizing Suburb of EUR’42, «Journal of Contemporary History», 31, 2, Special Issue: “The Aesthetics of
Fascism”, April, 1996, pp.397-418; Idem, Building Power: Italian Architecture and Urbanism in Libya and Ethiopia, in Forms of Dominance. On the Architecture
and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, a cura di Nezar AlSayyad, Aldershot, Avebury, 1992, pp.211-239; Krystyna von Henneberg, Imperial Uncertainties:
Architectural Syncretism and Improvisation in Fascist Colonial Libya, «Journal of Contemporary History», 31, 2, 1996, pp.373-95; and Edward Denison, Guang Yu
Ren and Naigzy Gebremedhin, Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City, London, Merrell, 2003.
On the history of Italian planning in East Africa, see Alberto Boralevi, Le città dell’Impero: urbanistica fascista in Etiopia, (1936-1941), «Storia urbana», 8, 1979,
pp.65-115; Giuliano Gresleri, 1936-40: Programma e strategia delle «città imperiali», in Architettura italiana d’oltremare: 1870-1940, a cura di Giuliano Gresleri,
Pier Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, Venice, Marsilio, 1993, pp.178-201; Gresleri, Architecture for the Towns of the Empire, «Rassegna» 14, September,
1992, 36-51; Architettura italiana d’oltremare. Atlante iconografico, a cura di Gresleri and Giorgio Massaretti, Bologna, Bononia University Press, 2009. The three
volumes edited by Gresleri are extensively illustrated and include images of numerous materials which are no longer available in Italy’s Central State Archives
(Roma, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, hereafter ACS). See also the excellent study, Solomon Addis Getahun, A History of the City of Gondar, Trenton, Africa World
Press, 2006.
Giuliano Gresleri, Pier Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, eds., Architettura italiana d’oltremare: 1870-1940. Venice: Marsilio, 1993.
Krystyna von Henneberg, “Imperial Uncertainties: Architectural Syncretism and Improvisation in Fascist Colonial Libya,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2
(1996), 373–95.
Paul Henze, Layers of Time: a History of Ethiopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Wendy James, Donald L. Donham, Eisei Kurimoto and Alessandro Triulzi, eds., Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and After. Oxford: James Currey, 2002.
Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome 1870-1950: Traffic and Glory. Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1973.
Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism. Seattle: University of Washington, 2006.
Stuart C. Munro-Hay, Ethiopia, the Unknown Land: a Cultural and Historical Guide. I.B.Tauris, 2002.
Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience. London: Zed Books, 1985.
Richard Pankhurst, History of Ethiopian Towns: from the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1982.
-----, History of Ethiopian Towns: from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1935. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1985.
Donata Pizzi, Città metafisiche: città di fondazione dall’Italia all oltramare 1920-1945. Milan: Electa, 2005.
Manuel João Ramos and Isabel Boavida, eds., The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art: on Portuguese-Ethiopian Contacts in the 16th–17th
Centuries. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
Paolo Scattoni, L’urbanistica dell’Italia Contemporanea. Rome: Newton & Compton, 2004.
Marida Talamona, “Addis Abeba capitale dell’impero,” Storia contemporanea, 16, nos. 5–6 (1985), 1093–1130.
-----, “Libya: an Architectural Workshop,” Rassegna 14, no. 51 (3) (1992), 62–79.
Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991. Oxford: James Currey, 2001.