Informality-sustainable city nexus: The place of informality in advancing sustainable Ghanaian cities

Abstract

Economic and spatial informality dominates the cityscape of countries in the Global South. From the perspective of urban practitioners and other stakeholders, there are two main schools of thought that discuss the roles of informality in the urban development discourse. The first school maintains that informality hinders the urban development process while the other posits that informality could be helpful in the urban sustainability push. In this article, the researchers, focusing on the latter, explores the productive functions of informality in developing sustainable Ghanaian cities. The researchers relied predominantly on secondary data. Using the Boolean search methodology, data were extracted from 85 articles/reports/websites that were obtained from online data and journal publishing repositories such as JSTOR, Scopus, SAGE and Taylor and Francis. The results from the thematic analysis of the data indicate that informality plays a vital role in promoting the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of cities in Ghana. Specifically, the informal economy and informal spaces contribute to the employment of both men and women, household income, tax revenue, waste management, water access, organic farming, health care access, social equity, and innovation. The paper concludes that informality in Ghana could profoundly facilitate the attainment of the sustainable city development objectives. Viewing informality through a productive lens, as we have argued in the paper, calls for a shift from ‘broad blanket and criminalisation’ policies on informality to more inclusive and pro-poor policies. Additionally, understanding the enormous opportunities informality presents to cities in the Global South will lead to increased investment and restructuring to mitigate the barriers its poses to the city development process.