Determinants of safety and liveability in Kumasi and Tamale Metropolitan Areas in urban Ghana

Ernest Bagson,Martin Oteng-Ababio,George Owusu

doi:10.4314/gjds.v16i2.5

Abstract

This article examines the determinants of residents’ perception of local level safety of life and property in an environment of rapid urbanisation and limited governments’ efforts to adequately secure urban Ghana. In a survey of 1,335 respondents, 54 key informants and 12 focus group discussions, the results, from binary logistic regression and thematic analyses, indicate a generally safe urban space but varied individual and neighbourhood level determinants of safety of life and property. However, there is no statistically significant difference in the determinants and construction of safety across the three socio-economic neighbourhoods in the metropolises partly because of blur territoriality between settlements in the cities. The paper recommends collaboration between home/land owners and urban planners as one of the surest way of improving neighbourhood boundaries and perception of safety. Keywords: Urbanisation, Neighbourhood, Safety, Life and Property, Built Environment, Urban Ghana

Highlights

The global experience of urbanisation in the twenty first century is eminent and variedly noted
Whilst 62 percent of the respondents in Kumasi indicated that youth disruption was a problem in the pursuit of safety of life and property, 64 percent of the respondents in Tamale perceive the opposite
With an increase in one unit, respondents who show willingness to intervene in the course of crime were 1.321 times more likely to perceive their community as safe compared to those with no willingness to intervene in the course of crime

Summary

Introduction

The global experience of urbanisation in the twenty first century is eminent and variedly noted. Described the twenty first century as the “Century of the City” whilst Kofi Annan – former Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) – referred to the twenty first century as the “urban millennium” in his address during the world conference on cities in Berlin titled “Urban 21” in the year 2000. Brown, predicted the dominance of the urban built environment in the twenty first century by titling mankind within the period as “an urban species”. Such expressions reinforce the global nature of urbanisation in the twenty first century even though the UN-Habitat, (2010) indicates that the rapid pace of urbanisation and its ramifications are globally unequal. A significantly large proportion of urban population will reside in the developing world especially in Asia and Africa (UNHabitat, 2012; UN, 2014) even though some scholars question the validity of the data portraying the exceptional nature of urbanisation in the developing world (Pott, 2009; 2012; UNDESA, 2012)

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Conclusion