Visible and Invisible Actors in Urban Management and Emerging Trends of Informalization; A Case Study from Kolfe-Keranio Sub-City Addis Ababa

Cities of developing countries have experienced rapid physical and demographic gro\vth in the recent decades. This has brought two challenging tasks for the governments of such countries. The first task is promoting economic growth aimed at improving the living standards of citizens. The second challenging task is coping with the growing demands of urban infrastructure and services to promote socio­ economic and enviromnental sustainability. However, with increasing population growth and inefficient urban management, keeping up the growth of cities in pace with the basic social and physical infrastructure development is becoming unattainable. The failure of municipalities to provide basic social and physical services in the newly expansion areas of cities has led to the mushrooming of informal actors in areas of urban land and service management. Addis Ababa is inhabited by a population of almost four million and it is one of the fastest growing cities of Africa where the provision of infrastructure and services has never kept pace with the grmvth of the city. Even though there have been various interventions to harmonize the process of urbanization, with the overall qualities of life, the generic problems of the city still form part of the daily life uf its citizens. The study summarized here attempts to give an account of the growth of Addis Ababa through examining the urban management practices and planning interventions and their implications for the management of urban land, infrastructure and services. The study has uncovered the discrepancy between the rhetoric urban management objectives and the actual outcomes of urban management policies and strategies. Major emphasis has been on how the formal and informal actors involved in urban land, infrastructure and service management interact and the technical and structural constraints that have contributed to the uncontrolled growth and unsustainable management of Addis Ababa. As a frame of analysis, the study utilized an urban political economy approach planning theories and other related concepts such as structure, agency, institutic. UtI analysis, and societal non-compliance. The urban political economy approach is found to be relevant in offering a problem-centred frame of analysis for urban management and participation of citizens in decision making. The theoretical framework is also useful for assessing the rhetoric and actual achievements of urban