Cities should be dynamic centers of exchange, innovation and economic growth that provide the platform where people, ideas and capital come together, so disclosed experts.
Scholar Teshome Abebe said that one new way of organizing our society is by building mini-megalopolis which is a set of roughly adjacent city agglomerations forming a continuous urban region. Cities are taken as the springboards for economic growth and macroeconomic policy making. Regulations and political schemes that limit urban development constrain the movement of labor and capital. They as well, reduce the potential for income mobility and elevate standards of living over time.
He added “We have a population growth rate of 2.31 percent, an eye popping doubling of the population in just 30 years using the simplest method of calculation; an urban population of 20.3 percent; and an urban working age population of 12.8 million people compared to a rural working population of 40.8 million persons.”
As to him, an intentional growth plan is needed by policy makers as this is the real world. And in the real world, people need an economics that can integrate resources, social stability, and the environment into one cohesive, realistic, internally driven, long term framework.
He further indicated that the agglomeration of cities adds to the richness of our analysis when one considers the sheer economic size and contributions they espouse to the country’s Gross Domestic Product. As demonstrated around the world, agglomerations are the engines of the global economy. Their impact provides insights into how infrastructure plans and economic development policies should be directed to initiate or improve regional integration in Ethiopia. Cities are dynamic centers of exchange, innovations and economic growth. They also provide the platform where people, ideas, and capital come together.
He went on to say that cities are one of the best forms of a powerful impulse to unite people. Rather than heeding the faulty assumption of preserving all cultural places focusing attention on some is necessary. On the other end cultural places that beg for attention are precluded.
Cities help converge cultures as opposed to merely co-existing. Agglomerations would bring economic activity closer to where people already reside. Governments, consumers and business can share benefits in effective megalopolis integration. Government initiatives in establishing mega regional development plans can trigger positive benefit from better transport links, in turn triggering more robust housing markets.
He capitalized that agglomerations would reduce urban migration mostly to Addis, thereby reducing unwanted and unplanned urban sprawl, and the competition for ownership. Furthermore, based on the particularities of the pairing of the cites planned or chosen, agglomeration brings economic growth and development closer to the people, thereby helping to convince all that economic growth is being distributed roughly equally within the country.
He stated that the focus on agglomerations would help build new pillars of development buffeted by quality education, science and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, and more equality. Agglomerations will lend to the empowerment of the populace, amplify local pride, and break the psychological wall that the center of the Ethiopian universe is Addis Ababa. A by-product of a pro-agglomerations policy is that it would make regulations that limit urban development unnecessary and irrelevant as well as backward as these would reduce the potential for income mobility and rising standard of living overtime.
Dr. Engineer Zegeye Cherenet on his part said that cities are the heart of urban civilization. Africa and Ethiopia are as well the last frontier of urbanization. Architecture and city making in Africa including Ethiopia is betraying both nature and society.
He further pointed out that higher rate of urbanization without having industrialization and modernization, increase rural-urban migration, expand natural and manmade crisis, climate change, global economic uncertainty, failure of rural economy and political uncertainties are some of the challenges in cities’ development. In contrast, the availability of young population, fairly rich and recoverable natural resources including water, soil, and sun, backwardness, more chances not to repeat mistakes of history digitalization and access to globalization-easier technologies are some of the opportunities in the city development.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition, February 9/2020
BY MEHARI BEYENE
