Author:

Abstract:

This study attempts to give an insight into how place-based indigenous processes, through continuous legal and socio-spatial friction, produce urban reality along with the conventional mechanisms of planning. Based on an analytical perspective inspired by theories of urbanization and planning, namely planetary urbanization, self-organization, institutionalist perspectives on spatial planning and urbanization in the global south, the study focuses on the urbanizing context of the lake Tana area. The study backs on an explorative fieldwork to highlight the socio-spatial interventions and actions employed by hegemonic conventional planning and its counter-hegemonic indigenous alternative, Sefer making. An argument is put forward that conventional planning due to its extra-local driving interests, is continuously clashing with localized processes because of its low aptitude for innovative and self-coordinated indigenous actions on the ground, rendering the sustainability of its interventions questionable. The proclamations, directives and spatial plans crafted in the apparatus of conventional planning essentially demonstrate a foreign inspired development trajectory based on knowledge and financial/policy support from extra-local origins. On the other hand, Sefer making actions (indigenous settlement formation), mostly deemed illegal under the shadow of hegemonic interventions, seem to have been cornered as a survival mechanism despite their contextually embedded socio-spatial compatibility. In the processes of Sefer making, households engage in collective actions such as fencing one’s own territory, bridging those fences with networks of collaboration for sharing scarce infrastructure, and collectively claiming and appropriating their social space by directly confronting conventional planning interventions. Through elaboration on the processes, interventions and (re)actions, this study calls attention to the line of resistance where the small-scale operations of Sefer making intersect with the large-scale impositions of conventional planning.