Neoliberal Urban Restructuring and Customary Land Regimes: the Foundation of Ghana’s New Cities

Abstract

The growing literature on new city developments across Africa has demonstrated significant political, spatial, and social implications for governance, urban form, and dispossession. This literature examining privatized urbanism offers a strong critique of local government ceding its role and mandate for more comprehensive urban development to property developers, who offer immediate if piecemeal solutions to housing and service delivery challenges of rapid urbanization. This literature also demonstrates that these projects entrench spatial and social inequality as they exist in special enclaves that dispossess low-income communities. This paper broadens the discourse beyond land acquisition to explore the institutions and multiple actors surrounding property regimes, that suggest fundamental distributional implications for who can access land and how. As such, the paper takes an historical institutional perspective in examining the top-down neoliberal restructuring of land and property relations in Greater Accra and Western region in the Appolonia and King City developments, to understand how such reforms have interacted with and altered the existing institutional landscape. Building on prior research of the World Bank and Government of Ghana Land Administration Project of the last two decades, the paper demonstrates the bottom-up response of customary land holders to new institutions, incentives and how these facilitate private new city projects. The paper responds to two inquiries: How do new city development project developers intersect with existing land regimes in Greater Accra and Western regions? How have the economic and social relations that constitute property rights in land reshaped urban politics and exacerbate inequality? Ultimately, the paper offers a critical perspective on new city developments, the enabling role of land reforms and their constituent actors, and how these urban transformations produce inequality.