What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don’t even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.

If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it’s not a coincidence: Nell’s Primer in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here’s an example of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized lessons and traditional teaching methods:

Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to her: “Hello! Would you like to hear a story?”
She nods and listens to a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named “Rahel” like she is and that she likes to wear blue–but for now the green book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to trace shapes on the screen. “R is for Run. Can you trace the R?” As she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. “Run starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog named Rover.” Rover barks: “Ruff! Ruff!” The Princess asks, “Can you find something Red?” and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on a nearby bush. “Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find something big and red?”

As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole words. The book’s responses are written on the screen as it speaks them, and eventually she doesn’t need to leave the sound on all the time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle to draw different shapes).

Rahel writes her own stories about the Princess, which she shares with her friends. The book tells her that she is very good at music, and her lessons begin to encourage her to invent silly songs about what she’s learning. An older Rahel learns that the block language she used to talk with the turtle is also used to write all the software running inside her special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book, and Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him learn to count.

It is six o’clock in the afternoon; our air plane starts its descent. Solar panels, first only a few, then more and more become visible through the clouds installed throughout luscious agricultural fields, announcing the proximity of the metropolis. Then, in the distance I can see it: Addis Ababa, the ‘new flower’. 150 years after its creation through Menelik II, its name sounds to me like a long promised wisdom, which has been finally crystallized into reality. The last daylight paints the small structures in reddish colors. Minutes later, the soft fabric below appears like a porous mass, lights shimmer through small openings, seemingly illuminated rivers form an organic network through the mass. The vegetation of the mountains flows almost undisturbed into the bowl-shaped cityscape, where it forms a translucent veil, protecting everything beneath. Lights illuminate trees from below and create patterns reminding me of veins. Underneath, small rapid moving vehicles are to be seen, almost like ants running in a seemingly organized chaotic manner. My daughter is glued to her window. She was born here in a time when all of this was just a dream. Today she is part of an unprecedented change, and proud of it.

I can see the old palace of Menelik and his wife Taitu; I can see the pixelated character of Merkato; but most of all I can see and almost feel the immense density of social spaces. I can’t wait to immerge into the new cultural mile of Sidist Kilo, a place full of Ethiopian culture, restaurants, street theater and interaction. I finally want to see the recently finished pedestrian zone around the national theater, which apparently became a new magnet of the city by day and by night. Over and over again, I want to walk through the cultural park on the former train tracks, which can be found at the southern end of Churchill Road, one of many centers of the city, almost like the Ethiopian version of New York’s Central Park.

The landing is smooth; the engines powered by hydrogen come to a standstill at the gate. Ethiopian Airlines was the first commercial airline worldwide to adopt hydrogen power technology for its entire fleet, since the countries decentralized power supply system generates enough energy to produce the fuel almost free of costs. We walk the gangway. Every time I came here since my first visit in 2006, I could already smell the city right here: the scent of burnt firewood, continuously deforesting the country every year. But today, I don’t smell anything. The households of Addis Ababa cook with gas from their own production. They create butane gas using the electricity coming from their solar panels. How was all of this possible? In 2024, the government decided to give out small solar units for each household in Ethiopia. By spending only a fraction of the yearly foreign aid provided to the country, units in the value of 200 US Dollars produced energy of 100 Watt per hour for millions of families in the country, enough to have light during the evening hours, powering radios or small pumps for water distribution. Soon after, small privately organized corporations formed, creating micro grids among neighbors, then villages or whole kebeles. Farmers started to add more panels to their system and upgraded their capacity. Finally, they could build a network spanning kilometers into the regions, using new loss-free cables in order to transport the electricity over long distances. People in the most neglected rural areas started to sell extra energy, using their cell phones. There was no more need to migrate into bigger cities. They could sustain themselves in the rural areas, farming energy and selling it to the booming industry with much cheaper prices than a centralized grid could ever have done. Soon after, the first small success stories spread through the country; cooperatives took on larger investments and installed the first wind power mills. Step by step, these cooperatives activated the biggest capital Ethiopia has: its people, their intelligence and entrepreneurial potential.

Today, the country can satisfy its whole energy requirement out of electricity converted from solar radiation, alongside wind, geothermal and hydropower production. By harvesting energy from millions of small privately owned photovoltaic power systems, the old touristic slogan of ‘thirteen months of sunshine’ won new relevance. The state owned hydropower stations are mainly used as a back-up system in Ethiopia and to export large amounts of electrical energy to neighboring states. With the income, Ethiopia developed much faster than the rest of the African nations. While others still followed a model of growth based on fossil energy, Ethiopia empowered the individuals. Information, data and with it education played an immense role. Pressure was taken away from big cities like Addis Ababa which enabled the markets to finally deal with the long existing gaps in housing and infrastructure.

New ideas of how a similar approach ¬– empowering the individuals ¬– could also be adapted for the housing sector played an important role. A young generation of architects formulated ideas to rethink the usual approach employed in social housing projects. Instead of providing out-dated and out-cultured typologies coming from abroad, a new system was introduced of two to three storey half-build structures, which could be finished by the inhabitants according to their financial possibilities and needs. Built very densely, people moved into small neighborhood developments on the same places they used to live their whole life, favoring a social mix and ground floor access to enable them to build up small scale businesses close to their homes. Social bounds and networks were kept in place and formulated the starting cell of an economy based on micro entrepreneurs of which more and more grew fast into bigger companies and business structures.

It was understood that economic growth is directly linked to the social and spatial structures of the people. Ethiopia had the great advantage of never being colonized, so they could develop their own view and method of growth, based on their own culture and needs. Instead of a tabula rasa approach, which was practiced since 2007 in some of the inner core areas of Addis Ababa and pushed people out of their social and economic networks, the city administration started already in 2015 to favor the new ideas of rebuilding the housing infrastructure from within. Small interest groups and corporations started to develop a very heterogeneous housing market, regulated only in terms of density, height, ecological footprint, and quality of diverse building materials. The city earned by selling the land to the new owners, starting an identification process of the people and equaling groups of different social and cultural backgrounds. The result was a decrease in social strains, improved security in Addis Ababa and everybody was enabled to build their future with their own hands. The neighborhoods were also made responsible to develop decentralized sewage systems, garbage systems and to regulate their fresh water supply. It was finally understood that a city is build by millions, not only by a few. Today Addis Ababa is an organism of individual operating cells, creating an open system that can withstand any threat from outside, since it is build on heterogeneous elements which are fast in adapting to new challenges.

Electricity in abundance also changed the way Ethiopians move. From the airport we take the electrically powered tram. Along Bole Road images pop up in my mind of how this east-west axis used to look like. To drive along here took hours. The exhaust of the cars made breathing difficult, black smoke came out of almost every car, even new ones using regular tuned engines in the height of 2600 meters above sea level. Most of the diesel was not burned and formed a yellow cloud hanging over the city every day. The first reaction of the administration to the notorious daily traffic jams was a very old fashioned one: they widened the street, yet another lane to create even more traffic and even worse conditions. Somebody told me once it would be as if I would open my belt around my waist in order to prevent gaining weight. It was simply the wrong approach: wider streets attract more traffic and the same was true in Addis Ababa. Two things changed all of this: the abundance of renewable energy made electric powered traffic more affordable than fossil fueled alternatives. First, short electric bus connections were introduced by private initiatives. Then, an electrical tramway was built by the city administration, moving hundreds of thousands of people every day. Shortly after, public transport was given priority on the main axis of the city. Dedicated lanes were introduced and cars were banned from African Avenue, Ring Road and other major veins. Instead, another form of transport was introduced on those major roads: dedicated lanes for electric powered two wheel vehicles. Once the infrastructure was created, the market exploded. The vehicles were cheap. They were initially imported, but now, they are produced in Ethiopia, giving job opportunities to thousands of people. By now, these vehicles “Made in Ethiopia” are exported to almost every African nation.

Dedicating infrastructure also gave them the opportunity to rethink the spatial and social concept of the street network in Addis Ababa. Learning from cities like Dire Dawa, where people can walk on shaded walkways since its foundation by the French, the biggest urban plantation project launched in the history of Ethiopia. It was the aim of the city administration to shade every walkway and street as much as possible. Indigenous trees and plants were selected which have an umbrella shape such as the acacia. Larger trees were selected in order to form an immediate effect. Shading the walkways and streets began by an initiative of the administration along the mayor axis, but the neighborhoods and kebeles followed right after. The plants form today an incredible protection layer in the inner city. Illuminated during the night hours, one feels like moving through a garden. The microclimate changed in a matter of years. The vegetation absorbed the high sun rays and absorbed carbon dioxide from its surroundings. Most of all, it generated a new quality of life. The tree, which for thousands of years represented the place of Ethiopians to gather and interact, introduced again a cultural identity, which is unique to the Abessinian society.

Looking through the windows of our silent tramway, I can still see the remains of what was once believed to be the future of Ethiopia in the beginning of our century. Ugly slick glass bunkers in under cooled colors and at great distance from the street. They appeared like objects without character wearing sunglasses to establish barriers. They look the same as what they once were: misunderstood imports of power. But they do not belong here where millions of people are empowered. How colorful, open and unique the structures look just next to them. They embrace the street with arcades, protecting the vendors from sun and rain. How human their scale feels with heights not exceeding five stories here on a main axis and how dense they were built forming a street line close to the bike lane, shading it even more with natural means. Here, heterogeneous architecture forms a building mass to enhance the quality of outside spaces and not to separate themselves from it. Restaurants and cafes have their tables outside, a scene I was looking for so much when we used to live here some 40 years ago.

For architects, the Ethiopian climate is a paradise. Usually, no heating and no cooling of the buildings is necessary. But of course it requires knowledgeable and well-trained designers and planners. Recessed openings in the facades of the buildings guarantee the protection from rain and sun. Large overhanging roof structures do the same, collecting rainwater at the same time. Most of all, it was the change in the building laws of Ethiopia that sparked an incredible innovation process in the construction sector. Most of the materials used today are produced within the country, not far from where they are needed. High tech knowledge was combined with low tech materials in order to find ways of getting out of expensive material imports. Organic fibers formed the reinforcement for Ethiopian produced cement, straw panel technology and stabilized soil blocks formed major components for wall constructions whilst composite bamboo materials became a backbone industry for the country, since more than 50% of all African bamboo is growing in Ethiopia. Expensive steel imports could be minimized, in part because high-rise buildings are not necessary any more in Addis Ababa. The decision of reducing the height to five stories on major axis and to three stories in mixed residential zones eased up the material consumption of the construction sector enormously.

Arriving at our friend’s house, we are happy to see the changes since our last visit. When they bought the unit 30 years ago, it was nothing but a promise. Their family has lived here for 140 years, they came here to serve the emperor and lived – just like the majority of the citizens in Addis Ababa – in mud and corrugated metal huts around the palace, which were considered ‘slums’ in the beginning of the twentieth century. But the area was not demolished like so many others in Kasanchis or Lidetta. Here, new housing models based on the possibilities and entrepreneur potential of the tenants were introduced: houses, which were only build with the bare minimum of structural means and the potential to be finished an added on by the inhabitants themselves. The ground floor was left as an open public area for small-scale business endeavors of the families, covered with a floor plate. This plate, to be reached by an outside stair, became a new, elevated private ground for the families. From here, two stories were erected, connected by an inner staircase and equipped with the most basic infrastructure like fresh water and a sewage pipe, all supplied and managed by the neighborhood. Walls out of natural stone and air-dried clay bricks were filled in the concrete skeleton structure, easy to handle and very inexpensive to produce. The future tenants could even help to build the basic shelters to save as much money as they could. Like that, families like our friends could afford to move in these “to-be-finished” units on the same place where their ancestor used to live for all those years. Each house was built only half, leaving an empty space on the first floor for future construction possibilities between the neighbors. For the first couple of years, our friends lived in the basic structure, but when they expected their first child, they decided to place a division wall in the second floor, creating some privacy for themselves. Soon after, they started to fill the gap to their neighbor and doubled their floor space as the family was growing bigger. When we walk up to the first floor, one is fascinated by the atmosphere created by the mixture of living and working spaces in the neighborhood. Life in Addis is pleasant, the temperatures are mild and almost all activities are happening outside. People are gathering around small plazas, all of them overgrown with at least one big tree, following the ancient tradition of Ethiopia. Cars are not welcome here; the public space belongs to the people and their daily routines. The design respects the individuality of the citizens, it allows them to materialize their hopes and dreams, and the city government gives the framework and the possibility without patronizing the inhabitants. Like that, thousands of vivid communities could grow over the years, each one special and unique, as such, the city became a conglomeration of differences, a healthy system of heterogeneity. We like to be here, we like to see the change every year and we see how proud the people are, how much care they take to maintain their properties and spaces around them.

What a turn the city took. In the beginning of the century, as a young architect following the urban development of Addis Ababa into a more and more segregated, abrasive and anti-social place, I almost lost hope. But today it is such a fulfilling experience to see and feel how livable this space is. It just took a few brave decisions. Since the third decade of the 21st century, prosperity and growth in Ethiopia is based on an ecological transformation, which affected the whole society. It came by empowering the individuals.

You think all of this is just a dream? On Friday, May 25th 2012, for the first time in its long history, Germany produced more energy converted from solar radiation than the whole country consumed on that day with its 80 million inhabitants and booming industry. This fact gets even more surprising in that that almost 100% of the solar panels necessary for the conversion are privately owned, primarily installed in rural areas. In total, renewable energies accounted in the first half of 2012 for 25% of all energy production in Germany. In the last year, solar energy saw the biggest increase in the market and went up by 47% compared to 2011. Today, Germany is the world’s top market for power converted from solar radiation and its installed capacity accounts for more than a third of the global total. Looking at the geographical position of Germany, this fact surprises even more, since countries in southern hemispheres show much higher potential and efficiency rates to use solar radiation as a major energy resource. It is a fact that Ethiopia is amongst those countries where solar energy could be produced in abundance.

Starting in the 19th century, the industrial revolution introduced technologies based on the consumption of coal, oil and gas. For over 150 years now, global markets are fueled with finite and non-renewable resources. Next to the finite nature of those, carbon dioxide emissions threaten our lifestyles, health and security. The dependency on fossil resources pressures economies in so called developing territories. In some African nations, the import of fossil resources is significantly exceeding the national domestic product. This development cannot be sustainable. In recent years it became clear, that we cannot globalize our current energy systems and we can also not globalize our oil-based transport systems in place. We also cannot globalize urban typologies without reflecting local, social, cultural and most of all ecological conditions.

The urban development from its very beginning was always a mirror image of our own cultural, social and more and more our technological accomplishments. Fascinated by the industrial development of Europe and North America in the beginning of the 20th century, architects began to understand their designs as machines: efficient, productive and reproducible in the millions. It was their strong belief that by applying the same linear functionalism as the industrial fabrication did, human life would be transformed into a more productive and therefore happier level. With the “Charta of Athens” in 1933, the “Congress International de Architecture Moderne“ (CIAM) manifested all future city planning to follow the mentioned principles of an efficient, linear organism, which is divided into functional areas. The concept of the Functional City became the dominant blue print for modern architects and planners of the time. They shaped the cities in Europe and North America following the ideology put forward by the ‘Charta of Athens’.

The economic success and financial growth of those nations in the second half of the twentieth century resulted in a fusion and also confusion of the visible image of the cities with the notion of modernity. Those images started to be imitated by new booming economies in the beginning of the twenty first century, mainly the Tiger States in Asia, India, Dubai and China. The African cities also started the copy paste strategy, losing their own identity in the process. If they do not stop the import of images, they will be for centuries nothing else but a rip-off of an outdated system. While the European countries started to reinvent themselves with great struggles in order to overcome their existing ideologies, the developing nations have the great chance to be ahead of the game and introduce a reverse modernism, whereby the North could learn from the South. It needs visionary leadership and decision makers to believe in the very strength of every nation: their people. If it is still true that our cities are a mirror image of our social, cultural and technological accomplishments, how would cities based on an ecological transformation if not revolution look like? Can ecology be the fountain of youth for our economies? And can such a development shape the urban territory as the industrial revolution did? Can we think of African cities that path the way for a new way of thinking and invent the necessary modes of an ecological urbanism? Can we think of African cities that produce more renewable energies than they need? Can we think of African cities that favor public space over speculative space? Can we think of African cities that base their housing projects on cooperatively owned incremental programs instead of ready-made objects? Can we think of African cities with zero emissions? I clearly think we should.

The Green Forum Ethiopia under the leadership of Heinrich Boell Foundation in Addis Ababa commissioned the Chair of Architecture and Construction Dirk E. Hebel at FCL Singapore in collaboration with the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development EiABC to invent an alternative “green” scenario for the city of Addis Ababa in the year 2050. The conference concentrated on the issues of Energy, Mobility, Cultural and Social Space, Housing and Information. The event was visited by more than 500 people and arose immense interest from the media as well as the City Administration. As guest of honor, the Swiss Ambassador H.E. Dominik Langenbacher attended the conference as well as delegates from several federal ministries and the UN-Habitat. In the meantime, the Department of Masterplanning and Vision of the City Adeministration invited the speakers to present the work in their offices.

Team FCL Singapore: Dirk Hebel, Felix Heisel, Marta Wisniewska, Alireza Javadian, Gerhard Schmitt, Stephen Cairns, Remo Burkhard, Eva-Maria Friedrich, Matthias Berger, Stefan Mueller Arisona, Ludger Hovestadt, Jorge Orozco, Alex Erath, Max Hirsh, Sonja Berthold, Ying Zhou, Edda Ostertag, Naomi Hanakata, Lindsey Ann Sawyer, Cheryl Song, Noor Faizah Binte Othman, Kevin Lim, Amanda Tan

Team EiABC: Bisrat Kifle, Addis alem Fekele, Tewedaj Eshetu, Yosef Teferri, Eyob Wedesu, Joachim Dieter

Team Green Forum/Heinrich Boell Foundation: Patrick Berg, Ayele Kebede, Jonas

Through a collective effort in the past 40 years, Ethiopia achieved something remarkable – the decoupling of economic growth and mobility from burning fossil energy carriers. As a result, the capital Addis Ababa, this year received the title of “most livable city in Africa” for the second time in a row. This is mainly due to reasons connected with the management of emissions, social space initiatives, public transport concepts, education possibilities, ecological driven industries and safety concepts in the city combined with a long term strategy of economic growth through ecological strategies put in place by the city government.