Landscape of boundaries and control in Ga-Mashie, Accra Ghana

Abstract

Tasked with creating liveable cities that accommodate future growth, planners seek to order space according to function. Planners are driven by the need to define and maintain a hegemony of a desired shape of the city, what I call a planned normal. This demands plans, zoning regulations, legislation, and policy create a system of boundaries and control for how space will be used. In this, planners are constrained by funding, priorities and term limits of political interests, and jurisdictional control. In the global south, the planned normal is largely an aberration; the dominant form is organic and informal. People challenge these planning boundaries, not just through the courts but by daily negotiations and compromises with agents of the state. Such spatial compromises, I find, are constantly being re-negotiated daily by residents with multiple agents. In my dissertation undertake a comparison of women in fisher communities in two informal settlements – Ga-Mashie (Accra, Ghana) and Fort Kochi (Kerala, India). I did this using remove photovoice, following which, I conducted walking and in-depth interviews with the participants. In this paper, I show how the state constrains the movement of people through their settlements in four ways – fragmenting and confusing municipal boundaries; creating a hierarchy of rule implementation; poorly defined legislation; and finally, enlisting developing a project of modernization, presenting a vision of a city devoid of street vendors. My participants in Ga-Mashie, Accra, Ghana, all women street vendors, are at the receiving end of this landscape of boundaries and control.