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). Villa in an upper class residential district, c.1937-38.

Gondar (Ethiopia). commercial and residential district, c.1936-41. Jimma (Ethiopia). Post and Telegraph Office, c.1937-38. Harar (Ethiopia). Mosque and market square, c.1936-40.

Throughout the 1930s, cities in Italy and its African colonies were transformed in shared qualities, including a requirement to represent the Italian regime, a concern with response to the fascist regime’s imperial ambitions. In the metropole, these changes were manifesting social hierarchies, a mandate to enforce racial segregation, a sensitivity to largely symbolic gestures that included the erection of monuments and the renaming of topography and climate, an interest in historic preservation, and an accommodation of streets. In the colonies, however, planners restructured the built environment to embody experimental construction techniques spurred by the restricted availability of conventional imperial policies and goals on many levels. The cities of East Africa, and especially those building materials. Equally instructive are the differences between the cities, due to their of Ethiopia, bear witness to the use of urban design to reconcile the fascist regime’s varying historical and geographical contexts. This essay identifies the key aspects of demands for ideological representation with the practical needs of everyday life. these colonial cities, and situates Italian colonial planning in relation to efforts to organize Italian planners frequently laid out boulevards that joined a significant new building and control vast territorial holdings. These cities also demonstrate the diversity of Italian representing the fascist empire to an iconic historical structure representing the Abyssinian architecture in Ethiopia, as state, party, institutional and private interests separately sought empire. Parades on these roads always began at the older site, symbolically reinforcing an appropriate formal expression for their facilities. the transfer of imperial power. A similar appropriation of historic structures appears in Urban design was a key tool of Italian colonial policy during the occupation of Ethiopia the spaces set aside for “adunate” (political rallies) outside the embattled walls of royal between 1936 and 1941. Italian urbanism throughout the fascist era illustrates the castles or fortresses, where the assembled masses symbolically re-enacted the seizure of disquieting compatibility between progressive planning practices and authoritarian political Italy’s African possessions. Italian urban designers carefully used zoning and landscape regimes. Cities built in Italian-occupied East Africa further demonstrate the extent to which to further construct social identities by segregating colonial cities according to race, modern urban design could participate in the coercive project of constructing imperial Tripoli (Libya). Rally in the piazza in front of the restored castle, 1935. religion and class. Yet evidence increasingly shows that these spaces were not designed identities, both amongst Italian settlers and among African colonial subjects. As case by the well-known architects whose names appear on each city’s master plan, but rather studies in the design and construction of Ethiopian cities under Italian colonial rule, Harar, by engineers and “geometri” working in municipal and regional planning offices at the Jimma and Gondar display the themes of identity formation and ideological representation direction of military governors and other extraordinary patrons. that animated urbanism in Italy’s African empire. 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 Marc Angélil and Dirk Hebel, Cities of Change: Addis Ababa: Transformation Strategies for Urban Territories in the 21st Century. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010. Giuliano Gresleri, Pier Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, eds., Architettura italiana d’oltremare: 1870-1940. Venice: Marsilio, 1993. fascista, «Abitare», 169, October 1978, p.76; Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Milena Batistoni and Gian Paolo Chiari, Old Tracks in the New Flower: A Historical Guide to Addis Ababa. Addis Ababa: Arada Books, 2004. Krystyna von Henneberg, “Imperial Uncertainties: Architectural Syncretism and Improvisation in Fascist Colonial Libya,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 Press, 1989; and Giorgio Ciucci, Gli Architetti e il fascismo: architettura e città, (1922-1944), Turin, Einaudi, 1989. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Italian Colonial Cinema: Agendas and Audiences,” Modern Italy 8, no. 1 (2003), 54–55. (1996), 373–95. The literature on Italian colonial urbanism includes: Marida Talamona, Libya: an Architectural Workshop, «Rassegna» 14, September, 1992, pp.62-79; Idem, Addis Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, Italian Colonialism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Paul Henze, Layers of Time: a History of Ethiopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 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 Getahun Benti, Addis Ababa: Migration and the Making of a Multiethnic Metropolis,1941-1974. 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Edward Denison, Guang Yu Ren and Naigzy Gebremedhin, Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City. London: Merrell, 2003. Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia Under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience. London: Zed Books, 1985. 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, Mia Fuller, “Building Power: Italian Architecture and Urbanism in Libya and Ethiopia,” in Forms of Dominance. On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Richard Pankhurst, History of Ethiopian Towns: from the Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1982. 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, Enterprise, ed. Nezar AlSayyad. Aldershot: Avebury, 1992, 211–39. -----, History of Ethiopian Towns: from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1935. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1985. Pier Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, Venice, Marsilio, 1993, pp.178-201; Gresleri, Architecture for the Towns of the Empire, «Rassegna» 14, September, -----, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian Imperialism. New York: Routledge, 2007. 1992, 36-51; Architettura italiana d’oltremare. Atlante iconografico, a cura di Gresleri and Giorgio Massaretti, Bologna, Bononia University Press, 2009. The three Donata Pizzi, Città metafisiche: città di fondazione dall’Italia all oltramare 1920-1945. Milan: Electa, 2005. volumes edited by Gresleri are extensively illustrated and include images of numerous materials which are no longer available in Italy’s Central State Archives -----, “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 Manuel João Ramos and Isabel Boavida, eds., The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art: on Portuguese-Ethiopian Contacts in the 16th–17th (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 31, no. 2 (1996), 397–418. Centuries. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Press, 2006. Solomon Addis Getahun, A History of the City of Gondar. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006. Paolo Scattoni, L’urbanistica dell’Italia Contemporanea. Rome: Newton & Compton, 2004. Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Marida Talamona, “Addis Abeba capitale dell’impero,” Storia contemporanea, 16, nos. 5–6 (1985), 1093–1130. Fasil Giorghis and Denis Gérard, The City & its Architectural Heritage: Addis Ababa 1886-1941. Addis Ababa: Shama Books, 2007. -----, “Libya: an Architectural Workshop,” Rassegna 14, no. 51 (3) (1992), 62–79. Giuliano Gresleri and Pier Giorgio Massaretti, eds. Architettura italiana d’oltremare. Atlante iconografico. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009. Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991. Oxford: James Currey, 2001.