ABSTRACT
Ethiopia provides a valuable and important case study of urban development in sub-Saharan Africa for several reasons. The first of these stems from its sovereignty: the country may have been occupied by a western country for a short period (1935–41), but it was never colonised in the way that other African countries were. The second lies in its cultural continuity, enabled by having sub-Saharan Africa's only indigenous written language. The third is identity. Ethiopia was one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as a national religion, which provided social and cultural definition to the society when political power waned. Finally, there was geopolitics, with the country having the military power to define and defend its territory. In the urban context too there are unique features that define the country, the most evident of which is its ambivalence towards cities and their role in society. On the one hand, there have been great eras in Ethiopia's history where the city provided the regional locus of power and influence, as with Axum at the beginning of the first millennium, or Gondar in the middle of the second millennium. At other times, though, and in total contrast, there have been periods when the monarchy would move the location of the capital with each reign, leaving the old space to revert to its previous rural form. Only Harar provided urban continuity, and for much of the time this lay outside of Ethiopian control and was closed to non-Muslims.
