Making room for vernacular planning despite hyperurbanization: The cases of Awramba and BuraNEST in the Lake Tana area, Ethiopia

Source abstract

Urbanization in the Global South is caught between the homogenizing waves of planetary capitalist transformation and speculation and localized differentiations due to acts of everyday survival. Despite the conceptual illumination planetary urbanization brought on the territorially omnipresent mechanisms of urbanization, transversal and confrontational qualities of Global South urbanization differentially hybridize those mechanisms. Within similar frictions in Ethiopia, the cases of BuraNEST and Awramba demonstrate outlying logics of producing the urban, integrating vernacular processes. As such, following a theoretical perspective on planetary capitalist urbanization and the concept of differential space nuancing it, this article argues for the right to self-produce the urban by investigating spatial planning in these cases. Exploring these cases across a historical timeline, interviews, and secondary materials helped trace their negotiated room for integrating differential planning and vernacular capital in hyperurbanization. The article’s findings elaborate on the visions, hybrid institutions, confrontations, and compromises in the cases. It discusses how the cases made room for vernacular planning through their traits of autonomous desires, hybridity, and compromises toward differential self-management. As such, the cases constructively couple global mechanisms driving urbanization and place-based differential practices in the context of rural–urban transformation in the Lake Tana area, Ethiopia.