PRINCIPLES OF ITALIAN COLONIAL URBANISM

DAVID RIFKINDFlorida International University, UNITED STATES

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.

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:

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.

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.

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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.

Gondar (Ethiopia). Post and Telegraph Office, c.1937-38. Gondar (Ethiopia). Villa in an upper class residential district, c.1937-38.

Asmara (Eritrea). Aerial view of city center, c.1937.

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.

Tripoli (Libya). Rally in the piazza in front of the restored castle, 1935.