Re-thinking Streets through Pedestrians in Mekelle [Ethiopia]: Forms of Resistance and Hints for Urban Design

Walking constitutes over 60% of urban trips in Ethiopia, highlighting its critical role in accessibility, sustainability, and public health. Despite this predominance, urban planning remains largely car-centric, producing streetscapes that marginalize pedestrians and neglect the cultural and social dimensions of street life. Everyday practices in the city of Mekelle- such as walking along carriageways, clustering at curb edges, and informal crossings- persist as forms of resistance and adaptation, continually reshaping city streets from the ground up, yet often subjected to punitive measures. Theorists of everyday resistance,including Scott (1990), Lefebvre (1991), de Certeau (1984), and Sauer (1925), emphasize that such practices are not inefficiencies to be corrected but meaningful acts of appropriation, cultural inscription,and transformation. Ignoring them in planning is to ignore how the city is actually produced and lived. This study therefore investigates how planners can reframe these practices as design intelligence, embedding them into formal urban design processes to create vibrant, pedestrian-centered streets that reflect local culture and foster inclusive urban vitality. Through comparative analysis of seven case study streets in Mekelle city, empirical evidences discloses that walking constitutes 52.66% of total traffic flows and nearly 68% of street activities, which occurs at an average speed of 1.34 m/s shaped by gender, load-carrying, and street conditions. It is both the dominant transport mode and a cultural practice embedded in the city’s spatial fabric, where differentiated street roles structure mobility, stationary practices (32%) sustain vibrancy, street infrastructure privilege vehicles, thereby reinforcing systemic inequities in urban circulation. This research documents how residents adapt to infrastructural inadequacies and exclusionary planning through patterned forms of resistance- such as rerouting, walking off-sidewalks (over 50%), informal crossings (over 60%), clustering in shaded areas, and vending spillovers ( where street vending (7.07%) slightly exceeds formal shopping (6.56%)). Far from being random disruptions, these practices function as systemic feedback mechanisms that expose infrastructural gaps while generating new spatial logics. Organized into circulation-based, comfort-based, and commerce-based adaptations, these behaviors highlight the agency of residents as co-authors of urban space. Resistance hotspots identified around shaded areas, transport nodes, and informal markets illustrate how circulation, commerce, and sociability converge to produce both friction and vibrancy in the city. On the other side, the research exposes the cultural narratives of these everyday practices within the cultural ethos of mereba -a Tigrian traditional communal space of gathering, negotiation, and resilience. Extending the mereba into the street, the study conceptualizes Mekelle’s public realm as an expanded cultural commons where mobility, sociability, and livelihood intersect. Building on this foundation, the research proposes a context-led urban design framework called merebatatstreet, guided by five principles: multifunctionality, cultural protocols, spatial mediation, collective authorship, and resilience. Operationalized through four street typologies-Access, Market, Entertainment, and Socialization- it clusters seventeen experimental models, ranging from desire-line crossings and shaded thresholds to hybrid commerce–circulation corridors and micro-merebas. These interventions legitimize informal practices as valuable feedback, embedding them into inclusive planning and participatory governance. Merebatatstreet typologies can be implemented in the scale of street, neighborhood, district, and across city, defining four scenarios: walkable street(s), walkable neighborhood(s), walkable district(s), and walkable city.