Geographies of investment: How do the wealthy build new houses in Accra, Ghana?

Abstract

World-city researchers have paid scant attention to cities in Africa. Van der Merwe (2004) emphasises that Sub-Saharan Africa is a huge information lacuna: African cities are often overlooked and portrayed as isolated and lower down in the global urban hierarchy. By some criteria African cities may appear isolated, but it cannot be concluded that African cities are irrelevant to the global economy. At the other extreme, King (2004) proposes that all cities be considered as world cities. This may be stretching the reality for most cities in Africa, considering that most states have not been fully liberalised. The reality for those cities leading in liberalisation efforts (e.g., Accra, Gaborone, Johannesburg) is likely to be somewhere in between. A more middle ground, argued by some scholars (e.g., Robinson, 2002; Rogerson, 2005), may be more on the mark. As Robinson (2002: 538) emphasises that when viewed from within these cities--"places allegedly off the global map"--the global economy is of enormous significance in shaping their fortunes and futures. There is large body of literature emerging on recent urban development and processes of land and housing marketisation and economic globalisation in developing countries (Wu, 2000; Rakodi, 1997). Urban development and processes has made the connections between the international and local dimensions of residential change more salient and reminiscent of the colonial period, when international factors heavily determined residential development. Researchers (e.g., Simone, 2004; Gugler, 2004) emphasise that African urbanites draw increasingly on material resources that can span the globe and probably more so today after twenty years of liberalisation policies. National data confirm this trend: the Government of Ghana found that aggregate income is only 64 percent of what households are spending (GSS 1996:57-60). Remittance flows account for much