CONCLUSION

ON JULY 1, 2021, BULLDOZERS and demolition crews rolled into Agbogbloshie, a community located on the east side of the Odaw River, near the Korle Lagoon, adjacent to the old city center. Appearing on colonial-era maps as an open wetland, Agbogbloshie became a site of unregulated settlement and economic activity as the city expanded rapidly in the 1960s. Inhabited largely by migrants from rural areas in northern Ghana, the residential section of the community is known as Old Fadama; however, the community is more popularly known as “Sodom and Gomorrah,” a reference to the perceived debauchery and decay associated with the neighborhood. The site has long been associated with a prominent market for onions and yams, transported from northern Ghana through community networks in rural homelands. However, in the last several decades, Agbogbloshie has become infamously synonymous with e-waste. International organizations regularly site Agbogbloshie as the world’s largest e-waste site and a symbol of poverty and desperation within the global economy: “Welcome to Hell” and “Inside the Hellscape Where Our Computers Go to Die” are just some of the article headlines about Agbogbloshie.¹ However, as numerous researchers have made clear, the difficult living conditions in Agbogbloshie obscure a robust and dynamic socioeconomic organization through which residents work as individuals and communities to creatively remake both the materials and infrastructures of social and economic life in a city with high rates of unemployment and low housing stock. While many of us might take our cellphones and TVs—or our functioning bureaucracy and piped water—for granted as forms of connection in the world, residents and workers in Agbogbloshie have to reimagine their relationship to these technologies and infrastructures. Young men and boys scramble among the e-waste and other industrial waste, searching for salvageable materials that are stripped and repurposed in a highly organized scrapyard. Members of the Greater Accra Scrap Dealers Association transform waste into recycled materials and manufacture local consumer goods like stoves. And grassroots civil society organizations mobilize communities to organize housing and social services and advocate for investment and support in local government.² And yet, in the international media and among local politicians and elites, Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama are obvious targets of blame—the cause of flooding and pollution—and a site of opportunity for reform through demolition and redevelopment.

Figure concl 1.1. E-Waste and Recycling at Agbogbloshie, 2018. Photograph by the author.

The demolition exercise on July 1, 2021, was initially targeted primarily at the onion market. The Greater Accra Regional Minister, Henry Quartey, had instructed traders at the onion market to relocate to Adjen Kotoku—a market that had been built more than a decade before in an effort to decongest the city’s old neighborhoods and commercial districts but that had remained unoccupied.³ The move was part of Quartey’s Let’s Make Accra Work project, which aimed to clean up the city and relocate traders off city streets and into state-sanctioned markets.⁴ Market women begged for more time, but Quartey pushed forward. When bulldozers arrived on the July 1 deadline, however, community members were shocked as they moved beyond the onion market to demolish the nearby scrapyard. Scrap dealers argued that they had never been part of the relocation plan and had received no notification from the task force in charge of the project.⁵ They also argued that they had not received the same resources allocated to the onion sellers in order to aid in the move. Instead, their shops were destroyed, and they were left without businesses. Quartey denied the accusations, pointing to public statements and arguing that the entire demolition exercise would have been “an exercise in futility if we leave all these structures and leave scrap dealers to be here. Then what is the point?”⁶

On the one hand, Quartey’s campaign to clean up Accra reflected a real and urgent need to address ongoing flooding, which has repeatedly resulted in damaged property and death during the annual rainy season. Waste that blocks gutters prevents the proper flow of storm water, and unsanctioned settlements in floodplains further exacerbate drainage issues while putting local residents at risk. The government had undertaken demolitions in Agbogbloshie before with limited success,⁷ but this time, Quartey insisted, things were different. “Read my lips—no one is coming back; it is done and no one is coming back,”⁸ he asserted. And yet, as the scrap dealers’ appeals suggest, the government provided few real alternatives for individuals who had not been able to secure economic opportunities and affordable housing in the sanctioned city sphere. Quartey himself acknowledges that people would return if the clearance was not rigorously enforced. By April 2022, contractors began erecting a fence to “secure the land” to “prevent encroachment,”⁹ and Quartey put a plan before the government at Jubilee House to redevelop the land in a way that would be “fitted into the development plans of Accra.”¹⁰ While the overall plan was “to bring immense life to the area” and build “a new Agbogbloshie that we all will be proud of,” the specific details still needed to be worked out with the various agencies.¹¹ A new Agenda 111 Hospital was designated for a portion of the land, but while Quartey argued that this project “was the best thing that could happen to a society” in “not just reclaiming the land but . . . [using it] to benefit society more than it used to be,” critics pointed out that regardless of the development plans, the well-documented soil contamination in Agbogbloshie—with lead concentrations one hundred times higher than normal levels¹²—was unsuitable for any redevelopment without significant remediation efforts.¹³ The site design images of a futuristic campus released in government statements raised additional questions about who exactly this redevelopment would benefit.¹⁴

FROM COLONIAL EXPERIMENTS TO INTERNATIONAL MODELS

In many ways, Quartey’s campaign was nothing new. Numerous government agencies had sought to clear Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama in order to make way for new development: this was part of a neoliberal approach to urban governance that privileges foreign investment. However, in attempting to assert control over land and redirect its use, Let’s Make Accra Clean also strongly echoed the rhetoric of technocrats and British government officials in the debates of the Accra Town Council (ATC) nearly a century earlier. Quartey, of course, is not a colonizer, and his language is not “colonial” in a conventional sense. Rather, in reviving the language of colonial urban development, Quartey and his colleagues highlight the degree to which the policies and regulations implemented under British rule in Accra were part of a much broader growth of technocracy, which emerged in and through the colonial project. These “imperial durabilities” are, Ann Laura Stoler argues, sometimes clearly evident—the persistence of administrative units, engineering projects, and legal frameworks that “mark the social geography” of postcolonial life. However, she argues that “colonial entailments may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns.”¹⁵ Currently, many of the most pressing issues “are features of our current global landscape whose etiologies are steeped in the colonial histories of which they have been, and in some cases continue to be, a part.”¹⁶

The new approach to urban development, emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coincided with both the formation and professionalization of new technocratic fields like urban planning, architecture, engineering, public health, and social work and with the expansion and consolidation of colonialism in Africa and elsewhere. These new fields were deeply connected to the cultures in which they were formed; they were “cultural practices” just as much as they were technological or scientific ones.¹⁷ As Porter argues for planning, seeing these fields as cultural practices recognizes that they are “specific to particular peoples, life views, times and spaces,” even as their theories and models “mythologize its universal features and norms.”¹⁸ Technocratic professions and the technologies, infrastructures, models, and policies they promoted were inherently connected to and produced through and with colonialism. They were certainly “tools of empire,”¹⁹ as historians of technology have argued, but practitioners in these fields also carried with them the philosophies and ideologies of empire, translating those abstract ideas into spatial forms. These “conceived spaces,” as Lefebvre described them, translated colonial intention into a plan of action, reorganizing space and social life in ways that advanced British goals to expand “expatriate enterprise” and “ordered modernity.”²⁰ As a “technology of rule,” twentieth-century infrastructure represented a particular form of urban governmentality through sanitation and public health, influencing “the conditions of possibility of urban life.”²¹ In urban infrastructure, material and social engineering were united in particularly powerful ways. In cities like Accra, the built form of the city and the technologies through which it operated were part of a new form of urban governance in which “notions of the contaminated city” were used to introduce and enforce “different cultural understandings of public and private, sacred and profane, appropriate and inappropriate behaviors.”²² Planners, architects, engineers, and others saw colonies as “laboratories of modernity” and often used the freedom that colonies offered to experiment with new ideas that, in turn, influenced practices in Europe.²³ In the process, British officials, technocrats, and their elite allies crafted a vision of the city that was defined by what Matthew Gandy calls “incomplete modernity”—a sense of unfulfilled potential that required reform and regulation, highlighted and “repeatedly justified through the use of cultural distinctions between modernity and tradition”—that sat at the core of the urban “civilizing mission.”²⁴

In Accra, as in other colonial cities, city builders used evidence of what they viewed as “nuisance” in order to justify reform and regulation that would reinforce the “rational and efficient use of space.”²⁵ The ordinances that created and empowered institutions like the ATC were inspired by “an authoritative promise of the better city yet to come,” giving these new institutions of urban governance the power to seize land and institute policies in the name of sanitation and public health.²⁶ Urban scholars have often emphasized the power and importance of cartography as a “science of domination” that “established boundaries and secured norms, treating questionable social conventions as unquestionable social facts.”²⁷ These archival remnants—along with buildings, roads, and plans—certainly exemplify or embody colonial ideologies,²⁸ but a focus on buildings, plans, and maps alone ignores the complex urban politics that form city space and urban life.²⁹ Effective urban governance required much more than a map or a plan. As the preceding chapters make clear, officials often failed to realize the “perception” or “conceived space” laid out on paper; infrastructure symbolized “an imminent modernity, even as that modernity was endlessly deferred.”³⁰ Rather, I argue, it was the power of regulation and the reframing of urban governance as a technical act that had a more powerful lasting influence on city life.³¹ Through imported technocratic discourses of urban planning and regulation, British officials and town councillors reframed Indigenous notions of spatial organization and governance in Accra as problems, which, they argued, posed threats to public health and welfare and inhibited growth.³² This new reframing privileged expatriate capitalism and carved out space for city elites, reorganizing the infrastructure, residential patterns, social dynamics, and economic processes around the demands of the “colonial-capitalist city.”³³

If early colonial policies were more “trial by fire,” by the late 1920s and 1930s, technocratic fields had cohered around a core set of policies, principles, and procedures that were increasingly integrated into the institutions of empire. When Lord Passfield sent his circular to colonial officers recommending town planning as “an orderly and scientific method of controlling work already in progress or inevitable in future, in a manner which secures the best and most far reaching economic results from current expenditure as it takes place,” he secured the importance of planning and allied fields in the logics and practices of colonial governance.³⁴ But as the history of urban development in Accra makes clear, these processes were far from straightforward. Colonial officials often projected their anxieties about the unruliness of city space generally on cities like Accra, reacting to rather than reflecting on the complex dynamics of the town and its residents’ needs. As Robert Home notes, “The physical form of African towns was shaped by laws and regulations imported or transplanted from elsewhere, but developing in a local context.”³⁵ Local residents could not be “cajoled” into new urban forms of living. In Accra, long histories of urban settlement and urban governance shaped a form of city life that was deeply rooted in the political, social, cultural, and economic practices of Ga people, even as it readily incorporated outsiders and embraced transnationalism. Colonial officials and technocratic experts often expressed frustration over their inability to fundamentally remake the town. They regularly blamed their failures on “tradition”—forms of social, economic, and cultural practice that contrasted sharply with the “modernity” of colonial visions.³⁶ And yet, in their demands for sanitation, economic opportunity, housing, and transport infrastructure, Accra residents argued that it was not the technology and infrastructure of modernity itself they rejected but rather the perception through which it was conceived.³⁷ Colonial officials encountered, not a blank slate, but a form of Indigenous urbanism with its own cultures of placemaking, logics of infrastructure, expectations of technology, patterns of organization, and values of order that represented a form of “lived space”—an alternative understanding of what the city was and who it would be for.³⁸

Robert Home points to the importance of these histories: “The initial processes which create towns live on and their subsequent story, inscribed as a sort of DNA of an urban form, entwining history with the social production of space.”³⁹ Certainly, as he argues, “the legacy of colonialism is still etched on the landscape and practices” of cities like Accra.⁴⁰ But in Accra, precolonial urban morphologies shaped a generic conception of a “colonial town form” into something that was uniquely Accra. This was more than mere resistance—the push and pull of urban residents. It is a set of fundamental values, patterns of movement, interaction, and spatiality that insistently shapes the urban form. The words from William Kentridge’s 2018 installation at the Zeitz MOCAA Museum in South Africa—“A nicely built city never resists destruction”—seems to capture this complex dynamic. On its surface, it points to the importance of progress. Like colonial technocrats and postcolonial government officials, Kentridge suggests that destruction is a necessary component to development. And yet, in the context of the installation in which shadowed figures trudge through sparse landscapes carrying their belongings, pushing carts, and holding signs, Kentridge also suggests a more skeptical interpretation from the perspective of local residents who—like residents of early twentieth century (and now early twenty-first century) Accra—are questioning whether the city is, in fact, “nicely built” and whether the destruction was worth it.

Colonial officials had limited success in physically reshaping the old Ga town. And while their efforts at reform and planning were often plagued by incompetence, this book argues that new technocratic approaches did have significant lasting impacts on the form and function of city life. Surviving buildings and roads might be the most obvious reminders of colonial presence in Accra, but the lasting impact of colonial power was—and continues to be felt—in the ordinances and regulations that shaped even the most mundane details of both public and private life in the city. A history of regulation and governance in Accra is, effectively, a documentation of the unfolding of a historical process of informalization, through which members of the colonial-capitalist class enshrined their own privileges and visions of city life. And in passing regulations and reshaping the legal landscape of urban governance, I argue that colonial officials, technocrats, and their elite allies effectively marginalized and criminalized Indigenous African practices, marking them as “nuisance” and subjecting them to new forms of oversight, policing, and reform.

In many ways, the histories laid out in this book were unique to Accra. Ga residents held unusual amounts of political, economic, social, and cultural power in the city for much of its history, and their ability to persist and preserve long-standing practices (seen here in trade, transportation, and housing) even as they embraced new technologies, infrastructures, and influences is a testament to the proudly urban identity of the city’s residents, which is both profoundly cosmopolitan and distinctively Ga. As a result, the ways in which imported ordinances, technologies, and infrastructures were debated, adapted, or discarded reflected both the strong sense of identity and organization in Ga communities as well as the specific historical conditions of Accra (and the Gold Coast, more broadly) in any given moment. Accra’s unique urban politics was also shaped by the power of early nationalist organizations and other political leaders, as well as the relative economic autonomy of Indigenous entrepreneurs in the Gold Coast—the foundations of early anticolonial organizing that helped mobilize local populations and articulate powerful alternative visions.

And yet, the ordinances and regulations, technologies and infrastructures at the center of these debates were also part of new and powerful global processes. As Keller Easterling argues about infrastructure more broadly, “Beyond the activity of the humans within it, the arrangement itself rendered something significant and others insignificant. The organization was actively doing something when it directed urban routines. It made some things possible and some things impossible.”⁴¹ As a result, infrastructure serves as an important link between different regimes. Far from being “hidden” or “unremarked,” infrastructures often help us trace the persistent politics of space and the assumptions that technocratic officials carry with them about the city.⁴² These new technocratic infra/structures created a framework of ideas that as historians of development have shown, became “deeply embedded in international policies and institutions in the decades following the end of colonial rule.”⁴³ If this new class of expert began using conferences and consultancies to share information and ideas in the context of colonial rule, the books and articles they wrote and the policies and practices they initiated became key reference works for policymakers and practitioners in the late colonial and early postcolonial period, transforming their “philosophical assumptions and apocalyptic narratives” into “conventional wisdom in the lexicon of contemporary development.”⁴⁴ That language of development and technocratic social engineering was embedded in national and global political institutions, as “experts” defined what James Scott calls “high modernism” as the primary form of “seeing like a state.”⁴⁵ At independence, colonial bureaucrats and technocratic experts found employment in newly established international institutions, taking their experience and assumptions with them to create the foundations of new professional fields and forms of international governance.⁴⁶ These ideas and practices were reinforced through new international technical and governmental standards, which became the dominant marker not only of progress but of quality—the “basic template for city building,” which enabled planners and other officials to “understand, examine, and modify the city, or a part of it.”⁴⁷ Increasingly, too, they have been embedded in a broad-based bourgeois class consciousness, shaping “political will, economic priorities, socio-spatial differentiation, and materialities” of middle-class residents in ways that echo the conflicts between educated elites and “the crowd” in colonial Accra.⁴⁸ It is part and parcel of a theory of modernization and development that claims its own universality and demands universal application, even as it remains grounded in the specific historical experiences of Western industrial capitalism.⁴⁹

WHAT’S NEW ABOUT THE “NEW ACCRA”?

Today’s urban politics echo these historical trends rooted in colonial spatial logics and the complicated legacy of decolonization, even as they reflect the new realities of global political economy. As Sharan argues, “Reflection on the contemporary city requires that we recover the ways in which we ordered our cities in the past, not with a view of a return but to excavate their traces in our everyday habits and ways of inhabiting the city.”⁵⁰ What, then, does that mean in contemporary Accra? How can we use these historical lessons to think about the plans of the present and the possibilities of the future? If the UN Sustainable Development Goals have reenergized conversations about urban futures and opened up new possibilities for thinking about equitable and inclusive urban development, what does that mean for how technocrats, scholars, residents, and government officials think, talk, write, plan, and act in cities like Accra?

As you drive down Accra’s High Street from the old commercial district and the historically Ga districts of Jamestown and Ussher Town toward the modern center of cosmopolitanism on Oxford Street, you travel around a roundabout. Independence Arch rises from the middle of the roundabout, a symbol of the promise of an independent Ghana, atop which stood Kwame Nkrumah on March 6, 1957, declaring that “Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!” Travel just a little further, and you reach a branch in the road that leads to Christiansborg Castle, the seat of both colonial and postcolonial government. Between Independence Arch and the Castle, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has erected a new sign with a new sort of promise, proclaiming, A NEW ACCRA FOR A BETTER GHANA.

The “new Accra” signals a renewed political commitment to urban planning and development in the city, embodied in the 2013 National Urban Policy. And things certainly do seem to be changing. Particularly in the city’s most elite districts, old buildings are being torn down and long-vacant properties are being cleared to make way for new high-rises of glass and concrete. Within the existing city, new districts like Airport City have grown rapidly, distinguished by award-winning architecture, international hotel chains, and upscale restaurants and shops. In 2017, the city began work on plans for a massive urban extension into the Ningo-Prampram District to the east of Accra. The construction boom coincides with what some have labeled a “cultural renaissance”—art galleries, street art festivals, fashion boutiques, cafés, bistros, cocktail bars, and music venues cater to a tight-knit community of artists, architects, intellectuals, and designers.⁵¹

Spurred by the promises of growth in a neoliberal Ghana, the “new Accra” is all about construction, from high-rise office buildings and skyscrapers to planned “communities” and new shopping malls. Some—Kente Tower, Gold Coast City, Adinkra Heights, Switchback Park, Appolonia, Cantonments City, Jamestown Boxing School—evoke the rich cultural and economic history of the city and its diverse population. And a select few—“Point of No Return” in Tema and a new Ghanaian National Museum on Slavery and Freedom—engage that history directly by creating sights for historical reflection and, undoubtedly, tourist dollars. Others highlight the global aspirations that informed their planning, with names like Riviera Residence, Infinity Tower, Accra Twin Towers, and Hope City. Still others evoke the corporations that the new construction will house—Unibank, Ecobank, MTN, etc.⁵² These new projects are flashy and forward-looking, designed by innovative, award-winning young architects from within and outside of the continent. These structures are going up alongside a slightly older set of buildings, like the World Trade Center Accra or Accra Mall, the worn appearance of which belies their central role in what feels like a real-life Monopoly game (an Accra version of which is currently for sale at Accra Mall and other high-end retail shops around the city).⁵³

Figure concl 1.2. A New Accra for a Better Ghana, 2016. Photograph by the author.

On the surface, these new construction projects seem to be the realization of the promise of “A New Accra for a Better Ghana.” The “new Accra” embraces the tenets of “new urbanism” among the city’s developer class and policy elites. Glittery new buildings, sleek architectural designs, upscale shops, and sustainable landscaping anchor new developments that promise “walkable blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity, and accessible public spaces.”⁵⁴ While new urbanism casts itself as a rejection of modernism, these movements share a belief in the importance of the built form and its ability to reshape behavior; this is done by creating new parameters of urban life, articulated through models and principles, and enacted through urban plans.⁵⁵ It is, in other words, the newest iteration of urban politics.

Developers are proposing not mere buildings but communities. Devtraco Plus, Ltd., which has been developing the East Cantonments Village property on 8.9 acres in the middle of one of the city’s wealthiest and most desirable districts, aims to create a livable, walkable, sustainable development with a strong identity. The development at East Cantonments was intended to be an example of a well-planned, mixed-use development that could appeal to international buyers, inspired by the Buckhead Atlanta project in Atlanta, Georgia. The project included plans for apartments, townhomes, a sports facility, a hotel, retail, and boutique offices that will provide residents with a place for greenspace, stay/residential, live/play, and commuting. This kind of property is not geared toward low-income residents or, in fact, even Ghanaians. Townhouses call for rooftop infinity pools, residences are insulated from the noise of the street, and jogging paths cut through the development. But this is more than a refiguring of space and spatial practice. This vision for a sustainable community of tasteful, powerful global citizens represents a sort of spatial occupation by the capitalist class. “New Accra” is, apparently, an empty playground for cosmopolitan urban imaginaries, unmoored from the realities of the vast majority of city residents even as it claims to cultivate community.

While, in theory, new urbanism’s focus on creating walkable, sustainable developments is modeled on the inclusiveness of the village, in practice, this approach has created a sort of omnibus of planning models. Some of those models have become hegemonic in themselves. The focus on bus rapid transit in urban plans to the exclusion of both local mobility systems/solutions and other possible technological alternatives, for example, has been a waste of resources in many cities like Accra. These cities can ill afford the loss, and these kinds of transportation issues divert attention from the central issues facing mobile urban residents. Driven by the interests of private corporations and Western urban planners, these models take on imperialistic overtones.⁵⁶ In a sort of parallel to critiques of gentrification, the preference for more expensive Western models marginalizes the majority of urban residents who are unable to afford access to new housing developments, transit systems, and other amenities.

The slick design of these new developments, the affluence of their residents, and the cosmopolitan appeal of the cupcake stores, boutiques, art galleries, and coffee shops surrounding them have attracted the attention of government officials and international journalists alike. Not unlike the attention given to Accra as the capital of Britain’s “model colony” or the new capital of the “black star of Africa,” Accra has now been branded Africa’s “capital of cool”—part of a new cultural and economic resurgence on the continent, with its own global investors, stylists, and tastemakers.⁵⁷ However, this language of cosmopolitan “cool-ness” and the rapid economic growth of a new oil economy obscures a much more complicated urban politics. These changes are unevenly distributed and embraced in the city, and official and journalistic commentary rarely reflects on who is left out in the “new Accra.” These unresolved questions of inclusion and marginalization are connected to these much longer histories of precolonial urbanism, colonial planning, and postcolonial modernization in the city. The rapid pace of construction and the remarkable consistency of developer plans and architectural styles are driven by global tastes and investor preferences. The city has no current and coherent master urban plan.

In carving out their own visions for the city, these developers participate in elite variations of managing. While scholarship on African urbanism tends to focus on the actions of lower-class residents who are often excluded or marginalized in government plans, the city’s affluent neighborhoods—Ridge, Cantonments, Spintex, Airport Residential, Dzorwulu, East Legon, and the like—themselves also highlight the varying ways in which urban residents have shaped city life. Some of these neighborhoods have their roots in colonial plans and draw their prestige from their historical connection to European residence in colonial segregation planning: the quintessentially British colonial urban form of the cantonment, for example, or the larger projects and grander structures of the Ridge. Dzorwulu and Airport Residential, for example, are planned neighborhoods that emerged after independence, growing up around prestige sites like Kotoka International Airport or the University of Ghana. Others, like Spintex, are recent additions, more directly connected to the recent spate of urban redevelopment.

Spintex today looks much like the rest of these neighborhoods, with relatively well maintained roads, expensive houses, and heavy concentrations of upscale retail and services. However, the neighborhood emerged in the early 2000s (noticeably around the same time that the Accra Mall was under construction) when wealthy Accra residents began building large homes on vacant land alongside the Accra-Tema Motorway—an area that was zoned for industrial rather than residential use and that had not been approved by government. Widespread condemnation did not stop construction. While more informal settlements (often labeled as “slums”) might have been cleared by bulldozers when residents failed to heed government warnings about building in flood plains or otherwise unzoned parts of the city, the Accra government was unable to demolish the large concrete homes of some of Accra’s wealthiest and most powerful residents.⁵⁸ Instead, residents carved out their own road and later pressured the government to pave it.

New developments, sprinkled throughout the city center and its sprawling suburbs and hinterlands, engage in a similar form of elite managing, negotiating competing claims to land, inadequate infrastructural provisions, and municipal bureaucracy using a wide range of strategies. Many local property owners, particularly in popular elite neighborhoods like Osu and Cantonments, seem eager to cash in on the new property boom. In Osu popular spots like Bywell Bar have been torn down to make way for new developments. Other property owners have chosen to refurbish colonial-era buildings as hotels and Airbnb rentals, drawing on some form of colonial nostalgia to market their properties. Other expats or returnees have set up roadside cocktail bars, live music venues, and private clubs, which draw on the ubiquitous material culture of the city’s lower classes but are inaccessible to those urban residents. The members-only club Front/Back, for example, asks members to enter through a shipping container identical (on the outside) to those that the city regularly targets for removal around markets. The club is decorated with roadside mirrors, local toys, and recycled materials that are so central to the life of the street, and yet the exorbitant membership fees exclude all but the most elite in Accra who use the space to network and play. A recording of Ngugi reading Things Fall Apart plays on repeat in the bathroom. Chimamanda Adichie novels sit on the shelves alongside books about Ghanaian art and critiques of development culture.

On the surface, these new developments seem to further exacerbate the social and economic inequalities that have long defined city life in Accra. Today an estimated 43 percent of Accra metropolitan residents live in “slums,”⁵⁹ and an estimated 80 percent of the country’s workforce finds employment in sectors like market trading and transport.⁶⁰ Accra’s urban poor operate side businesses out of their homes, purchase food in open-air markets, cook over coal fires, use underfunded public transportation, live without water or electricity, and send their children to apprenticeships with family members or keep them at home because they cannot afford school fees. Elite residents, by contrast, have access to a much wider range of resources and infrastructures at the local, national, and global level. Their children attend elite, private schools in Ghana and abroad. They access the internet on smart phones, own their own cars, purchase imported food from grocery stores, work in air-conditioned offices, buy water to fill giant tanks, and run generators. As elite residents travel between work, home, shopping malls, bistro, cafés, and clubs in air-conditioned comfort, largely insulated from the lived realities of the street outside, they reproduce a sociospatial inequality rooted in colonial residential and social segregation policies.

These inequalities are indeed real, and the income gap in cities like Accra seems to have grown at an accelerated pace in the last ten years, reinforced and reproduced through infrastructure and urban spatial forms. Inequity has also been exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies, weak commodity markets, and currency redenomination. In response to this politics of extraversion, “southern urbanism” or urban theory from the Global South has set its sights on the practices of the local, which are cast as forms of resilience and resistance in the face of global hegemonies that marginalize local residents and local knowledge. In particular, academics, policymakers, journalists, and planners often categorize the adaptations of poor urban residents in this context as manifestations of “informality” and target urban planning analysis and intervention on lower-class neighborhoods, markets, transport systems, and other infrastructure. This association of informality with poverty, I argue, is an oversimplified characterization of Keith Hart’s original formulation, which obscures a much more complex urban politics in the city and rooted in a much longer history of urban residence in Accra. By exploring this history of urban politics, we can better understand how many Accra residents claim a “right to the city,” often bridging the gaps and blurring the boundaries between the sociospatial inequalities inscribed in urban planning policy and practice. Accra residents describe these daily acts as “managing.”⁶¹ In contrast to phrases like “making do” or “getting by,” which are often associated with informal practices and imply survivalism, managing “highlights the ways in which participants engage in meaningful acts, strategically harnessing the resources at hand not only to accomplish objectives but also to construct satisfying lives.”⁶² Acts of managing transcend the distinctions of socioeconomic class in the city, uniting Accra’s population in a process of grassroots placemaking, simultaneously reifying and resisting the city’s economic inequalities.

WHAT IS THE CITY?

If the model city—the foundation of urban theory—is grounded in the expectations and assumptions of Western urbanism, what, then, does “the city” mean in a place like Accra? In focusing on the local and tracing the politics of “development” and the unfolding process of informalization in Accra, this book seeks to also shed light on the global. Of course, Accra, like other African cities, was and remains part of global flows of goods, people, and ideas in ways that are still underrecognized and underappreciated by many politicians, practitioners, and theoreticians; to some degree, this book seeks to open some space for thinking about those global connections, even if I do not explicitly trace them here. However, I would argue, the history of Accra also helps us think about the ways in which concepts are formed, flourish, and fail on a global scale. As Robinson and Srivastava have both pointed out, cities in poorer countries are often cast as “other” because city life seems to differ so significantly from Western urban experience—a space in need of “development” in contrast to the “modernity” of Western cities and an exception or aberration within narratives that claim “universality.”⁶³

Indeed, there is often “a disconnect between the stories and promises associated with the technology and what the urban space is actually doing,” and “modern” technologies and infrastructures often do function differently in African cities.⁶⁴ But, in treating examples like Accra (or, for that matter, nearly any African city) as an extraordinary exception, we miss opportunities to enrich our understanding of city life and challenge some deep assumptions and ongoing structural violence, rooted in the history of colonialism and empire. Rather than examples of “failed urbanism,” cities like Accra (or Bombay, Calcutta, Columbo, or Lagos) may actually be more honest representations of the rule, which our urban theory should be revised to accommodate.⁶⁵ We should, as Murray argues, be open to considering that there might be more than one form of urbanization and more than one type of city in the context of “global urbanism.”⁶⁶ But we should also consider that maybe the seemingly rapid transformations in twenty-first-century urban development—“where metropolitan landscapes are increasingly fragmented into distinct zones characterized by concentrated wealth, global connectivity, excess, and fantasy, on the one side, and neglect, impoverishment, and deprivation on the other”—might be less of an “emergent post-urban moment” and more like a supreme realization on long-standing urban processes that had, before the twenty-first century, been experienced unequally around the world.⁶⁷

The history of urbanism in Accra suggests that these processes are both new and old—a blatantly unequal form of urbanism that might be seeing a new moment of widespread embrace, but the roots of these global processes of urban fragmentation lay in the colonies where the inequalities and abuses of capitalism and their connection to governance were laid most bare and were at their most extreme. Jacobs argues that “it was in outpost cities that the spatial order of imperial imaginings was rapidly and deftly realized.”⁶⁸ If, for a long time, the economic power of the West meant that US and European cities could protect themselves by profiting from the exploitation of colonies, the deterritorialization of capitalism and shifts in the global distribution of power in the twenty-first century means that the old “wealthy metropolitan centers of global finance” are no longer safe.⁶⁹ These twenty-first-century cities are—as “colonial” cities always were—both implicated in these broader processes of exploitation and exclusion while also being profoundly variable and local.⁷⁰ In their “fragmentation” they are exemplifying a global process of informalization that is much older than we realize.

AFRICAN PASTS AND URBAN FUTURES

In his introduction to Under Siege, Okwui Enwezor argues that African cities “are collision points between tradition and modernity, between African development and external pressures; the new site for the reformulation of old and new influences, and the opportunity for the symbolic production of post-colonial identities.” Enwezor acknowledges that “as a consequence of their colonial legacy, many African cities still remain administrative systems, although disconnected from the city dynamics.” However, he argues, “the syntax of these cities today is not defined by the ‘modern’ grammar inherited from colonialism, nor by the assumption of an organic connection between individual and collective memory, of testimonies and beliefs. In these cities, where everything is interpreted and outlined by the apparent chaos of the everyday, where forms of self-organizing procedures, parallel and informal economies, and the resilience and inventiveness of urban dwellers have relentlessly kept many cities still functional.”⁷¹

Enwezor’s assertion of the disconnection of administration from the realities of everyday life is an attempt to grapple with the failures of urban governance and the ubiquity of alternative systems of social, political, and economic order, often glossed as the “informal sector.” In focusing on the syntax of African cities, Enwezor seeks to understand what these cities actually are—not as failures or aberrations or sites of incompleteness, but on their own terms. In doing so, he is part of a much larger scholarly conversation about the parameters of “southern urbanism” that seeks to place the “informal city” at the center of policy debates and scholarly analysis. In interrogating the “informal city,” theorists like Simone, Pieterse, and Enwezor rightly emphasize the experiences of the “urban majority,” who are largely left out of (or explicitly criminalized by) planning and policy processes. However, in embracing the framework of the “informal economy,” these scholars reify the artificial categories that have come to shape development practice but that often obscure the much more complex sociospatial histories of African cities.

These scholarly engagements with the “informal economy” seem to ignore the wider range of activities that the term originally sought to capture and explain. Keith Hart’s original formulation of the “informal economy” in Ghana was defined primarily by self-employment. In response to a lagging wage labor sector, Hart argued, many Ghanaians pursued more precarious economic opportunities that were not easily accounted for in economic surveys. While some of this work was, indeed, low-wage, Hart acknowledged that “informal activities encompass a wide-ranging scale, from marginal operations to large-scale enterprises.”⁷² The broader economic conditions that shaped the labor market and economic opportunities of 1970s Accra have not improved significantly in the last forty years. And yet, today the term “informal economy” and the broader category of “informality” are exclusively associated with the urban poor. Market traders, trotro drivers, cooked-food sellers, and beer brewers are all “underemployed” members of an “informal economy”—in Ga, kobolo, a good-for-nothing street lounger who embodies the precarity of “urban crisis.”⁷³ Independent social media managers, café owners, fashion designers, and Uber drivers are more often “entrepreneurs,” even if their work carries the same risk.

In Accra, as elsewhere, this politics of categorization has meaningful consequences for urban residents. As Hart notes, “Most enterprises run with some measure of bureaucracy are amenable to enumeration by surveys, and—as such—constitute the ‘modern sector’ of the urban economy. The remainder—that is, those who escape enumeration—are variously classified as ‘the low productivity urban sector,’ ‘the reserve army of underemployed and unemployed,’ ‘the urban traditional sector,’ and so on. These terms beggar analysis by assuming what has to be demonstrated.”⁷⁴ Today, “informal economy” and “informality” seem to have fallen into the same trap. In defaulting to these terms as a way explain contemporary African cities, we reify and reproduce categories that have been deployed in oversimplified and highly politicized ways by government institutions and development organizations. While scholars often use these terms to identify and demarcate groups that are underrepresented in development policy and yet are vital to the economic and social life of African cities, those same forms of demarcation have also been used by politicians and others to criminalize the activities of the urban poor, transforming them into targets of government sanction, demolition, and, at times, violent attack.

As the history of Accra’s urban politics demonstrates, this exclusive focus on the urban poor and the persistent use of “informality” as a frame of analysis obscures more fundamental questions about the systemic and structural violence of the built form and the power of spatial politics. In Accra, this politics cut across class, as rich and poor residents alike sought to make space and opportunity for themselves in a city that was increasingly not planned with their interests in mind. In tracing the unfolding of informalization as a historical process rooted in colonial-era urban governance, we are able to better understand the systemic or structural conditions that shape urban inequality and underdevelopment in cities like Accra and focus attention on possible alternative models and visions for the city, rooted in local understandings of space, infrastructure, technology, and community. But they also highlight complicated contemporary politics, in which “Westernization” often stands in for “formal,” privileging citizens of means, criminalizing the urban poor, and perpetuating imperialistic systems of urban underdevelopment.