Asmara was built to exclude the people who now define it. Designed under Italian fascism as an experiment in modernist urban planning – a city meant to produce new Italians and demonstrate a refined European modernity – it was organized through strict spatial segregation: Eritreans confined to the periphery, socially, culturally, and architecturally. And yet: the Asmarino, the distinctive urban identity that emerged from Asmara, is inseparable from the city’s built environment, its cafés, its boulevards, its aesthetics.
This paper traces how that happened. On the surface it’s a historical observation: the planned city and the lived city diverged. But as a methodological claim it’s more powerful than that. Official representations of cities – what institutions, planners, and policy documents say a city is, who it’s for, what it produces – are systematically insufficient accounts of what’s actually happening within them. The lived city is always producing something the planned city didn’t intend and often can’t see. What this paper finds in Asmara is a discrepancy between the meta-narrative of the fascist city and the reality of urban life lived within it.
Appropriation, in this account, is not a political act directed against colonial power. It is a generative process that articulates through everyday life, social practices, and individual strategies for social and economic mobility. This is the theoretical foundation for the concept of appropriation as it operates across the rest of this work. It informs the critical stance that runs through the project; that the discrepancy between institutional representations of cities and what communities actually produce within them is structural. Recognizing it as structural is the first condition for working within it deliberately, and for designing interventions that account for what the official representation leaves out (see DIY Cultural Diplomacy).