Stories of ordinary modernity

The 2024 edition of the Venice Architecture Film Festival, organized and promoted by ArchiTuned and held from November 2024 in Venice, demonstrated how films continue to serve as privileged windows into cities, communities, and territories. Against the backdrop of dramatic stories, the challenges of our contemporary world and the desperate search for adaptation become increasingly evident. Appropriately, Adaptations was the title and central theme of this recently concluded festival. Through cinematic language, it vividly portrayed the efforts of countries, cities, communities, and individuals to navigate these challenges. A standout example is When I Came to Your Door by Antonio Paoletti, which won Best Short Film at the Festival. The director narrates the physical and psychological destruction experienced by a group of people in Addis Ababa forcibly evicted from their homes. Themes of eviction and urban displacement are situated within a broader discourse on adaptation – its meanings and challenges, particularly in contexts of rapid urban development and social inequality. Paoletti captures real footage of one of the most recent demolitions that displaced low-income communities to make way for large-scale urban projects in a rapidly expanding city. Through the lens of a woman’s love letter, the film lingers on what remains after the demolitions – abandoned objects, empty homes, and vividly painted doors – imbuing these ruins with emotions and new metaphorical significance. Urban development is often perceived as progress, but When I Came to Your Door exposes the steep price paid by the poorest citizens. By focusing on the destruction of homes and small communities, the director creates a haunting portrait of a city where memories and social bonds are erased by the relentless march of urbanization, revealing its dehumanizing impact on the most vulnerable residents. The film amplifies the emotional resonance of these issues and showcases the resilience of those affected. On a broader level, it questions how cities can adapt to the challenges of modernity without sacrificing lives and existing social relationships. We had the chance to meet the director.

What inspired you to make a film about forced evictions in Addis Ababa? Was there a particular moment or experience that made you realize the importance of documenting these stories and the theme of adaptation and resilience in urban spaces?
In a way, When I Came to Your Door began in 2019, when I first visited Addis Ababa. At the time, I was an architecture student, graduating with a thesis on affordable housing. My research focused on a dilapidated neighbourhood in the historical centre on the verge of disappearing due to the city’s rapid growth. I was particularly interested in how local dwelling cultures might survive, adapt, or disappear during moments of intense urban transformation. What is the impact of larger social and political forces on people’s everyday life? I remember visiting a house in Talian Sefer, one of Addis Ababa’s historical neighbourhoods. We were welcomed by an elderly couple who invited us to sit with them in their living room. While discussing Talian’s history and the city’s transformations, the woman said: “Many areas in Addis are developing fast, which is good, but Talian Sefer is still the same.” As soon as she said that, I remember how her expression darkened slightly: “I wish this area of Addis Ababa could be preserved and not demolished. It should remain intact, like a living museum! This is history, bringing new developments would make us forget what is here.” Through similar conversations, I came to realize the paradox of modernisation. It seems inevitable: an entire country striving to improve their quality of life. Yet, due to the speed of change, low-income communities inhabiting Addis’ inner city for over a century are being uprooted from their homes as evictions and demolitions sweep through neighbourhoods occupying valuable real estate. These residents face not only displacement but also the collapse of a socio-economic capital—systems of mutual support and small-scale trade that were essential to their survival. In my film, I try not only to expose the paradox of progressbut, perhaps more importantly, to bring the viewer through the same process of realization that I experienced.

How do you see the theme of adaptation playing out in this context? How do the residents adapt to the loss of their homes and the erasure of their lives?
When I visited the informal settlement that you see in the movie, I found a half-demolished neighbourhood. Several families were still living in their houses, although now they were no longer part of a dense urban fabric; instead, they were scattered in a barren area full of debris. When we appeared with a camera, a resident shouted out: “First, you all demolish our houses and then you film us?”. Naturally, there was a lot of anger and frustration. It took a few visits, and the invaluable help of our interpreter Bethlehem Ghidey Gebremedhin, to gain people’s trust. Slowly, residents began inviting us into their homes, offering coffee or a meal, and sharing their stories. We came to realize that many of them were still waiting for compensation. They were promised an empty plot of land on the outskirt of the city. They told us that their homes were more than 70 years, they were there since the time of Emperor Haile Selassie. Some women explained that their livelihoods were closely tied to the neighbourhood’s proximity to the Faculty of Architecture. They would wash students’ clothes, sell injera to the faculty’s canteen, and brew coffee to sell on the streets. I remember one of the mud houses, still standing in 2019, being used as a print shop where architecture students printed their drawings. After their homes were finally demolished, many residents moved to nearby areas, starting all over again in another informal settlement. Once more, a temporary situation waiting for the next wave of demolitions to come. Beyond the anger, there was a sense of resignation, a quiet acceptance that survival in Addis Ababa often means adapting to relentless upheaval.

Your film depicts a vivid picture of the dehumanizing impact in favour of urban development. How do you see the clash between development and displacement? How could cities and communities get along with transformation and large-scale developments while embracing preservation and respect for the past?
Adaptation and resilience are values perfectly embedded in Addis Ababa’s neighbourhood culture. Their origin can be clearly traced in the city’s historical development. Addis Ababa was funded in 1887 and began as a collection of nomadic military camps, locally known as ‘sefers’. Alongside with Emperor Menelik, II, several dignitaries settled in Addis’ highlands together with their camp followers. As palace servants erected frugal houses for their families, these settlements gradually evolved into the informal urban structures that we would now call “neighbourhoods”, as the term sefer began to identify communities and places. Addis’ sefers are the direct result of the everyday actions of their inhabitants: the web of alleyways shaped by the unplanned mud houses; the accidental courtyard where people would gather to hang clothes and dry spices, the dwellings that evolved with time, mirroring the growth of each family. This organic, almost spontaneous evolution of Addis Ababa’s neighbourhoods reflects a deep-rooted cultural value of adaptation. During times of hardship, poverty, war, and famine, urban dwellers would rely on traditional practices of income generation, grassroots financial associations, and community networks. Yet today, this adaptive resilience is being tested by rapid urbanization. People receive a notice a few days in advance, water and electricity are cut off, and their houses are knocked down. Grand redevelopment projects, including large-scale real estate projects, urban parks, a new private palace, and road corridors dominate the government’s agenda. Similar projects are often about creating an image of progress, modernity, and economic opportunity, which are used to appeal to both international investors and domestic elites. This narrative, however, comes at a steep social cost. The sudden demolition of multi-layered environments like the sefers is disorienting. The letter we found on site captures this feeling: it’s an account of loss, not just of the physical space, but of the life and loved ones that once inhabited it.

In your opinion what are the key shifts we should be preparing for in our built environments and how can films like yours contribute to conversations around equitable urban development?
The accentuation of inequalities in our societies over the past forty years could be a key factor behind future social unrest. In rapidly growing cities, inequality becomes even more evident. Already in 1890, Danish-American journalist and pioneer of social documentary photography Jacob Riis wrote: “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” At the time, he was exposing the tremendous inequality in nineteenth-century New York, where the lives of the urban poor were largely ignored by the privileged upper class. Riis’s photographs documenting the overcrowded tenements, paired with his journalistic storytelling, transformed facts into a compelling narrative that demanded social change. Documentary filmmaking is an even more powerful tool in telling stories and raising awareness. It turns facts into relatable narratives. While demolitions and human rights violations in Addis Ababa are frequently reported in the news, these remain detached facts that are easily forgotten. They lack the emotional connection that induces deeper reflection. In my film, I tried to reproduce my experience of reading the letter in a demolished neighbourhood, a feeling of being lost, and the multitude of questions that arrived in my mind around the notion of development. Throughout the movie, I tried to evoke a sense of intrigue and confusion. You hear a letter about meeting a lover, but what you see is something entirely different. This dissonance creates confusion and forces the audience to try and make sense of it. In the beginning, one might think they are witnessing the aftermath of a catastrophe or a war. I deliberately postponed that last moment of truth. It is only at the end that the cause of the destruction becomes clear. It is precisely this final moment of revelation that can leave people with images that stay with you and encourage a reflection. Documentary films amplify the voices of people whose struggles are often invisible to the public eye. They can create an emotional connection that goes beyond mere facts – almost replicating the experience of encountering people and listening to their stories.

In light of the global challenges of migration, urbanization, and climate change, what do you think is the most urgent need for cities to adapt to? How could architecture find balanced solutions that could be forward-thinking and respectful of social structures?
By 2050, two out of three human beings will live in cities. Currently, approximately 80% of Ethiopia’s population resides in rural areas, but the country is undergoing rapid urbanization, particularly in Addis Ababa. The city’s urban population is growing at an annual rate of 4%, with projections indicating that Addis Ababa’s population could double within the next 15 years. Walking through Addis, one feels a constant craving for development and modernization, and cannot avoid noticing the invasive amount of construction sites. The rate of urbanisation is so fast that Addis Ababa wants to do things as quickly as possible, and there is no time for thinking. It wants to deliver faster, quicker and in huge quantities. Flying over Addis Ababa, one can see the result of this approach: a vast spread of identical condominium slabs, their repetitive clusters stretching across the city’s outskirts, creating a monotonous, rubber-stamp effect. These large-scale initiatives called the Integrated Housing Development Program (also known as the Grand Housing Program) have been instrumental in providing new homes, yet they remain largely unaffordable for lower-income groups and are mainly based on the endless repetition of a few standard housing types. These structures often fail to foster a sense of community or support the livelihoods of residents, who rely mostly on informal economies and social networks. Architecture plays a crucial role in addressing this growing global housing crisis. To tackle this challenge, we need to move beyond standardized solutions pursuing only efficient outcomes and focus on developing a variety of housing options that can cater for a wider spectrum of incomes. Rather than relying on a single, one-size-fits-all design, cities should adopt approaches that integrate the perspectives and needs of the people who will live in these spaces. Participatory design processes, where residents actively contribute to shaping their environments, is essential for creating housing solutions that are functional and responsive to the complexities of urban life. By working together with local communities, architects and planners can create spaces that do more than just house people – they can support a resilient, inclusive, and connected urban environment.