Paper short abstract:

By documenting the case of Addis Ababa’s construction boom, this paper invites a rethinking of how anthropologists have looked at the work of planners in urban Africa by exploring the relations between strategic and tactical planning-

Paper long abstract:

This paper invites a rethinking of how anthropologists have looked at the work of planners in urban Africa by exploring the relations between strategic and tactical planning. By documenting the case of Addis Ababa’s construction boom, I discuss how the overlapping between strategies and tactics in planners’ work both expresses the relative privilege of planners, as experts and agents of vested interests in the city, and the conditioned agency of planners, as themselves are acted upon by the courses of action of more powerful agents. In this context, strategic planning does not only fail. It is meant to fail, or at least implemented partially, because its purpose is to catalyse action, not direct it. Instead, tactical planning, while being situational and contingent, is not the realm of weak. Planners’ tactical agency contribute to further embed dominant orders of priority, and hierarchies of entitlement into the spatial fabric of the city.