Cartographic Enclosure and Urban Cadastral Mapping in the Ethiopian Somali Capital

Cadastral maps, which are designed as comprehensive systems for recording and surveying land relations, are critical for making society legible and governable. However, critical cartography scholarship suggests that exercising power through maps is not straightforward: It is dependent on how maps are created and used during the mapping process. This paper examines cadastral mapping in Jigjiga, a multi-ethnic city in the Ethiopian Somali frontier where state authority over land and people have long been contested among ethnic Somali residents. This paper follows the ruling government’s renewed attempt to establish land control through spatial planning based on document analysis and ethnographic fieldwork. It investigates how urban planners enclose the city’s property landscape cartographically on land use maps and how land surveyors used these maps to georeference property. It demonstrates the critical role of land governance experts in navigating the simplified map and a complex property landscape on the ground. Cadastral mapping is instrumental for state territorialization and land commodification, integrating ethnic Somali property into the sedentary logic of the state. Rather than providing an account of how property is rendered legible, this paper highlights the incomplete and open-ended character of cadastral mapping in the constitution of private property regimes.