Het traceren van onderhandelde vernaculaire praktijken: planning ondanks snelle verstedelijking in het gebied van het Tanameer, Ethiopië

This thesis is about locating and understanding vernacular practices in spatial planning tensions due to rapid urbanization of the Lake Tana area, Ethiopia. While the vernacular concept implies place-specific ways of being left out, or staying out, of dominant orders, the interactions between the two are eminent given the shared parameters of space and time. Thus, vernacular practices in the case studies are those practices entrenched socially and culturally and locally justified. They generate alternative ways of enabling spatial responses to urbanization, when state-led conventional planning practices fall short. Such vernacular remedies are providing urban housing, infrastructure and communal space by confronting and hybridizing outcomes of state-led planning. These are especially prevalent where state interventions are insufficient and blurred, while state-led planning responses are often illegalizing and informalizing such urban productions leading to insecurity, dispossession, and socially disruptive relocation of citizens in contexts like Ethiopia. Therefore, tracing such vernacular practices, on the one hand unveils their characteristics and qualities, while on the other hand unravels potential ways to reduce social disruption by understanding the negotiated production of the urban. The study, therefore, begins by positioning the vernacular as an umbrella concept which holds together the desire to differ, and the means to differ, negotiating for self-production of the urban. Both traits of the vernacular contest the globalized mechanisms of urbanization which are increasingly driven by homogenizing capitalist logics, and the illusion of a technocratic utopia of conventional planning producing the urban. The case study first engages in exploring historically what was the role of vernacular practices on the flip side of conventional planning in the urbanization processes of the Lake Tana area, Ethiopia (Chapter 3). Evidently, interventions of the state under the recent three regimes of planning for modernization, revolution, and capitalization did not always land as planned. They were confronted and hybridized by citizen-led practices deploying vernacular logics, rooted in the social interactions and collaborations, as well as cultural values, norms and attachment to land. Localizing the discussion further with field observations, interviews and secondary materials, Chapter 4 characterizes the vernacular practices facing state-led planning using zoomed-in cases in the Lake Tana area. The findings reveal that self-constructions, self-coordination of access to infrastructure, and self-allocations of social spaces are confronting and hybridizing conventional planning in peri-urban areas. Vernacular practices prevail through scale dependent tactics, through cognitive interpretations of preceding planning regimes, through seizing the opportunities in traditional institutions, and through exploiting the discontinuities in the discourse of conventional planning. Having this awareness about the role and the contested right of households and communities in producing the urban, it is essential to explore potential ways forward by investigating how particular cases make room for vernacular planning in Chapter 5. Awramba and BuraNEST, both in the Lake Tana area, demonstrate self-driven planning to self-produce the urban based on their own peculiar visions, hybrid institutions and compromises. Looking at the self-production of the urban in the cases clarifies their autonomous desires to produce differences and their means to differ based on heterogenous vernacular capitals. As such, the cases, their vicinity, and the comparison between them, demonstrate the significance of relying on a shared independent ethical value to constructively couple global mechanisms driving urbanization and place-based differential practices and develop a dynamic social space for vernacular planning. Departing from the Chapter 4 once again, the thesis goes further on Chapter 6 to assess future scenarios of confrontations between the conventional and vernacular self-organization of urban expansion. Making use of an alternative modeling approach mixing regression models of urban expansion with Agent Based Modeling, the study simulates hybridity and confrontations with vernacular practices molding the built-up structure differently in and around Bahir Dar city. The model provides scenario handles for decision makers of conventional planning to reduce eviction and displacement of self-organized urban expansions. The study is concluded by reflecting on the parallel space of vernacular hybridity in which households and communities are differentiating urbanization, despite conventional planning. They do this by their vernacular practices, which self-sufficiently link the local heterogeneity of capital providing the means to differ with their autonomous desire to differ, towards self-managing a different urban. While this empirically confirms the plurality of urbanization projects, it demonstrates how homogenizing strategies are vernacularized to proliferate room for differentiation. As such, the vernacular presents a conceptual arena where fragments of place-based phenomena can be collectively explored, thereby, leveraging the local on the global. Thus, while this work adds to research on planetary urbanization, the right to the city, and locally infused planning and speculation research, it generally argues for recognizing, mobilizing and expecting the vernacular agency in future planning practice and research. In short, the evidence from this research shows that constructing a planning system founded on citizens' consent at each spatial and temporal instance is more worthwhile than demanding ubiquitous compliance with technocratic planning decisions.