The Genesis of Peri-urban Ethiopia: The Case of Hawassa City

Peri-urban areas present planning challenges of contemporary urbanisation and settlements in the Global South. Studies about peri-urban area tend to focus upon the Global North and Asia, while little has been done on sub-Saharan Africa. Available research in sub-Saharan Africa is largely confined to studying economic forces driving periurbanisation, land markets and informality. Few have explicitly examined the policy forces driving it. This article analyses the urbanisation and policy forces driving periurbanisation in Hawassa, Ethiopia. It scrutinises the city’s urbanisation policy and the nation’s land policy to find out how and why they are linked with the city’s periurbanisation processes. The analyses utilises primary data collected through household surveys, field observations and key informant interviews, which are complemented by secondary data from national legal and policy documents, and regional and city administration reports. The findings show that Hawassa’s periurbanisation is driven by policy forces emanating from annexation-based rapid urbanisation and the loopholes in the nation’s land policy.