Urban Resilience and the Question of Food in Ethiopian Urbanisation: The Case of a Small Town in Ethiopia—Amdework

Abstract

Small towns in sub-Saharan African countries are usually faced with immense challenges, which are called stresses and/or shocks in the urban resilience literature. Diagnosing stresses or slow burns and developing local resilience against them is a crucial task that urban planners and practitioners usually neglect. This paper presents a robust methodology that demystifies the ambiguity around the concept of resilience, a concept usually understood as general and normative, through a bottom-up approach that makes it measurable. This is achieved by diagnosing the most pressing societal problem mainly through a household consumption survey—with people’s needs being at the heart of the diagnosis—and investigating its relationship with the spatial configuration of the case town, Amdework, a small town in northern Ethiopia. The research reveals that food, a marginalised issue in the urban agenda, is the most stressed consumption in the town, against which local resilience has to be developed. This relegation of the food agenda is mainly the result of unfavourable policies and practices manifesting itself in the form of an absence of officially designated space for food production and unfavourable land-use changes. Furthermore, the paper investigates other bottom-up-informal initiatives aimed at improving specified resilience against the food stress. It also examines challenges in the chain and in consumption that are testing food resilience in the case town.