The Line Around the Centre

The Fiat Tagliero stands on a corner near the centre of Asmara and it is a petrol station. Giuseppe Pettazzi finished it in 1938 in the shape of an aircraft: a glazed control-tower block in the middle and two reinforced-concrete wings cantilevered about fifteen metres to either side with nothing underneath them. Asmara tells a story about the props the building inspector demanded and the argument over taking them off, and the story is told with enough variations to be treated as a story. The wings are not a story. They have been out there, unsupported, for eighty-eight years, over a forecourt that still sells fuel when there is fuel to sell.

On 8 July 2017, at its session in Kraków, the World Heritage Committee inscribed the centre of Asmara — a little under 500 hectares of it — under criteria (ii) and (iv). It was Eritrea's first World Heritage Site, and it was listed as an ensemble: not the Tagliero and three cathedrals, but the street plan, the ordinary shopfronts, the cinemas, the workshops and the housing all together. Which raises the obvious question, since the plan was drawn by an Italian colonial administration and most of the buildings went up in the six years before the Second World War. An African state spent a decade lobbying to have a fascist colonial capital declared part of the heritage of humanity. That was a decision, and it had arguments behind it.

The plan underneath the buildings

Asmara became the Italian colonial capital in 1897, and in 1913 the engineer Odoardo Cavagnari produced its first master plan. Its organising device was the campo cintato — a bounded quarter for Europeans, with the indigenous population living outside it. The line was a planning instrument before it was anything else. It set which streets got drainage, which got paving, and who could be on them. Then came Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which turned Asmara into the staging base for the whole operation, and the building boom that produced almost everything now on the list. A new master plan drawn in 1938 by Vittorio Cafiero divided the city into zones on the same principle, hardened by the racial laws of that year: Eritreans were shut out of a great many of the bars and cinemas altogether, and Eritrean children's schooling was capped at four years of elementary education. By 1939 something close to half the roughly hundred thousand people in the city were Italian. The architecture that everybody photographs and the segregation that everybody skips past were the same project, drawn by the same hands, in the same decade.

Why it is still there

Cities like this normally do not survive, and the reasons they do not are prosperity and pressure. Asmara had neither. Italian rule ended in 1941, British administration followed, then federation with Ethiopia in 1952 and annexation in 1962, then thirty years of war. Through all of it there was no capital to redevelop with and no developer to want to. The war itself ended in Asmara without a battle: the EPLF entered the city on 24 May 1991 and the fabric came through effectively untouched. A hundred and fifteen kilometres away, Massawa had been taken in a three-day assault in February 1990 and bombed afterwards, and it is a ruin to this day. Same war, same country, fifteen months apart. It is worth being blunt about this, because the preservation literature is often coy: what protected Asmara first was poverty and luck. Neither is a policy, and neither lasts.

Three times in a century somebody has drawn a line round the same few hundred hectares of Asmara. Twice it was drawn to keep people out. The third time it was drawn to keep the buildings up.

The line, drawn a third time

The policy arrived in stages and it was Eritrean. From 2000 the Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project — run by the Eritrean architect and planner Naigzy Gebremedhin, and financed with a World Bank credit of about five million dollars — did the unglamorous part: surveying the centre and producing an inventory of more than four hundred buildings, which is the document without which nothing else is possible. Then in 2001 the government declared a Historic Perimeter and imposed a moratorium on demolition and new construction inside it. That is the pivot. Until 2001 an owner with money could pull down a 1930s cinema and put up whatever he liked; after it, he could not. In 2014 a dedicated office, the Asmara Heritage Project, was set up to write the nomination, which went to UNESCO in 2016 and was inscribed the following July. The city had been sitting on Eritrea's tentative list for more than a decade before that. It is a slow, ordinary, bureaucratic sequence — inventory, then rule, then dossier — and it is the only reason the luck of the 1990s turned into something durable.

Whose city is being listed

The Eritrean case for inscription did not pretend the origin away, and it did not need to. Italy governed Asmara as a colonial capital for 44 years. Eritreans have run it, lived in it, repaired it, subdivided it and used it for more than eighty — longer than the Italians were ever here, and through a period in which the buildings were maintained by people the original plan had excluded from most of them. A cinema whose audience Eritreans were largely barred from joining spent four years that way and has been showing films to Eritrean audiences for eighty-five. That is the argument, and it is a much better one than the aesthetics. The nomination also declined to draw its boundary round the pretty part only; Abbashawel, the dense quarter on the far side of Cavagnari's original line, is inside the property, and its housing is the hardest problem the management plan has to solve.

What the listing does not do is pay for anything. Reinforced concrete from the 1930s is at the end of the life its designers assumed; cement, steel, glass and paint are all import-constrained in a country with tight foreign exchange; and the same moratorium that stops a developer demolishing a building also constrains an ordinary owner trying to repair one, because what is permitted is now a matter for a conservation office rather than for him. A World Heritage inscription is frequently read abroad as a reward. In Asmara it is closer to an invoice, issued to a city that has been keeping the receipts for eighty years already. Walk the centre in the evening, when everyone is out on Harnet Avenue and the cinemas are open, and what you are looking at is not a preserved thing. It is a city being used, which is the only form of maintenance that has ever actually worked.