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Article:
»Macht braucht Platz!« Eine Untersuchung des Meskel Square in Addis Abeba, Äthiopien

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Abstract

The article examines the process to involve power relations increasingly in spatial phenomena. Power needs space in form of a square; logistically seen for the stagings of the mass, as well as through the political-symbolic and iconographic logic of the system square. The central square – as the icon of a city – is the visualised history and the envisioned political situation of a coun-try. Understanding the allocation and shaping of urban space as a question of political intentions enables the decryption of power relations. The study fo-cuses on a nuanced approach to figure out, how the analysis of a central square makes conclusions possible about the demonstration of power in au-thoritarian states. No place is more significant in the (contemporary) history of Ethiopia than the Meskel Square in its capital Addis Ababa. How has the demonstra-tion of power manifested itself at this point in its genesis to the present? This approach provides a novel contribution to a differentiated understanding of the central square as a visual metaphor for the socio-political shaping of a country respectively of a city.

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Mariacher, Markus C.: »Macht braucht Platz!« Eine Untersuchung des Meskel Square in Addis Abeba, Äthiopien. In: IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, Jg. 13 (2017), Nr. 2, S. 60-80.http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16437
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The item has been published with the following license: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz