Global South growth machines? A political-economic view of urban redevelopment and dispossessions in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT The dynamics of urban redevelopment processes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), especially around retail spaces, have gained currency among scholars. Some scholars frame these processes as state-led, informed by party politics, clientelism and meddling, and often resisted by traders and residents. Drawing from Growth Machine theory, this article uses a qualitative case study of the Takoradi Central Market (TCM) in Ghana to reframe this conversation in two important ways. First, it takes a broader view of these redevelopment processes by arguing they are constitutive of often-overlooked neoliberal processes that are disciplining the political-economic and spatial logics of people and spaces across sub-Saharan Africa. The TCM case illustrates the (mis)aligned spatial, economic, and political motives driving various actors within Ghana’s neoliberal placemaking processes that foster accumulation and dispossession around retail spaces under the cover of civic boosterism. Second, rather than simply focusing on local resistance and activism, the article orients us toward a relational understanding of the conflict that exits between market traders and the state by interrogating the embedded alliances and conflicts within and between different actors as they pursue their myriad (mis)aligned economic, spatial, and political motives. It is these inherent conflicts and alliances, and the neoliberal urban redevelopment contexts within which they occur, that must remain central to urban research and policy discourses in SSA.