Wherever You Go, There You Are: Fascist Plans for the Colonial City of Addis Ababa and the Colonizing Suburb of EUR '42

Abstract

This article concerns the two most ambitious city plans that were developed by Italian planners late in the fascist period. The first is the plan for Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, and the second is the one for EUR, or the Esposizione Universale di Roma (Rome Universal Expo). To some degree, my objective is to compare them, but not in the formal sense. My interest is not so much in tracing a history of plans as in discerning a story about intentions, the intentions of planners and what the two plans had in common in terms of the burden of the expectations with which they were invested. Addis Ababa was chosen to be the capital of the Italian Empire, which was proclaimed in May 1936, following the conquest of Ethiopia. This Empire, in East Africa, lumped together the older colonies of Eritrea and Somalia with Ethiopia into the entity of l'Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa), and also included Libya, which had been Italian since 1912.1 EUR, on the other hand, was to be an international exhibition, a world fair, just outside Rome, and was to be inaugurated in 1942, on the twentieth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome. The two plans were initially conceived at roughly the same time, and both were seen as opportunities to show fascist Italy in a prestigious light and present its modernity to other moder nations. Although EUR was built (and still stands) on Italian soil, the claim I will make is that both were colonial cities, and that, in fact, EUR was the final and most complete of Italy's colonial cities, since, in the end, it was the one that most thoroughly fulfilled the agendas of Italian colonial city planning. The image in Figure 1 was included editorially in the architectural publication Domus, in 1936. Italian troops had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and the League of Nations had imposed sanctions against Italy as a result. A wave of Italian propaganda followed that was meant to justify Italy's actions on the basis that