About the Department

The Department of Urban and Regional Planning was a branch of the former Architecture and Urban Planning Department at Faculty of Technology, South campus. The department offers BSc in Urban and Regional Planning, MSc In Urban Design and Development, and MSc In Environmental Planning and Landscape Design. In addition the department finished all grounding to launch the new PhD program in Housing for the coming academic year.For further information, please contact us at:

Urban and Regional Planning Department Faculty of Technology (South)
Addis Ababa University
P.O.Box 518
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Telephone: (251-1) 2 76 76 03,(251-1) 2 75 01 33 ext. 226
Fax: (251-1) 75 23 55 Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Head of the Department: Dr. Fissha Wogayehu

Goals of the Department:

The department has three primary goals...

• First, The Department actively prepares qualified graduate students to become competent, creative and effective practicing planners.
• Second, we contribute to knowledge in the field of planning through scholarly and applied research.
• Third, we undertake professional planning activities and provide service in collaboration with local planning agencies, a variety of public agencies, planning consulting firms and other private and non-profit sector organizations in the concept of “ IUL- Industry University Linkage”

Graduate profile

A career in urban and regional planning requires knowledge of planning philosophy, analytical methods, problem formulation and resolution, law and local government, the aesthetic, cultural, social, economic, ecological, and physical characteristics of human settlement. The proposed undergraduate preparation provides a comprehensive and coherent education in the humanities, modern analytical methods, the social and natural sciences, and the problem solving orientation of the professions. Because of the interdisciplinary emphasis of the program and the ever-evolving roles of the professional planner graduates can expect to perform several types of activities in a variety of settings over their careers. They will be specifically concerned with:

• The use of land in the city, in the suburbs, and in rural areas, and particularly with the transition from one use to another;
• Potentially adverse impacts of human activities on a limited physical environment and the possible mitigation of those impacts;
• The design of the city and the surrounding region so as to facilitate the activities in which people need and desire to engage;
• Settlement systems and the location of human activities in urban and regional space.
• Identification of social needs and the design and provision of services and facilities to meet those needs;
• The distribution of resources, benefits and costs among people;
• The anticipation of change and its impact on how people do and can live;
• Participation of citizens in planning processes which affect their future; and
• The way that choices are made, decisions implemented and actions evaluated, and the means by which those processes can be improved in urban and regional areas.

Organizational structure:

The department will have an institutional structure consisting of a department head and under him, one professor and two assistants that in addition to running the most important module, which is in this case the project, will also take the responsibility to coordinate each year they are assigned to. Besides, the different instructors that deliver different modules are also accountable to the department head. Outside the professional staff, the department head will also control the support staff. In the case where this support staff is accountable to two or more departments, a different arrangement will be sought out.