'Asmara is a jewel': but can Eritrea's modernising capital retain its charm?

It is unlike any other city in the developing world – brilliantly planned with hardly any slums. As the cold war with Ethiopia finally ends, Asmara can at last look to the future

Nakfa House, a mammoth building by Asmara’s standards, is a remnant of the last era of real optimism in Eritrea. Built in 1995, four years after the country broke away from neighbouring Ethiopia – the jubilant culmination of a 30-year struggle for liberation – Nakfa was intended to symbolise a country heady with ambition, and, in Asmara, a capital city racing to to be the Singapore of Africa.

Asmara is special not only because of the buildings. It’s also about the urban planning

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