Downgrading – An overlooked reality in African cities: Reflections from an indigenous neighborhood of Accra, Ghana

Applied Geography 36 (2013) 23e30

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Downgrading e An overlooked reality in African cities: Reflections from an indigenous neighborhood of Accra, Ghana Jose E. Melara Arguello a, *, Richard Grant b, Martin Oteng-Ababio c, Betlehem M. Ayele a a

The Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, USA University of Miami, Department of Geography and Regional Studies, USA c University of Ghana, Department of Geography and Resource Development, Ghana b

a b s t r a c t Keywords: Traditional residential areas Slum profiling Poverty Accra

African cities contain a range of low-income ethnic and cultural enclaves that defy conventional ‘slum’ typecasts and intervention guidelines. Further, new forms of urbanization (e.g. gated communities and informal settlements) have received heavy emphasis in recent urban geographic research. Such research emphases have many unintended consequences; one of which is that traditional indigenous neighborhoods in the older city are glossed over. This paper focuses on urban downgrading in Korle Gonno, a prominent and established indigenous community in Accra, Ghana. Using mixed-method data (including surveys), the results illustrate that a traditional neighborhood encounters many of the same dimensions of urban poverty as the more famed slums in the city, yet it experiences different poverty trajectories. We argue that the prevailing slum profiling techniques fall short of capturing these trajectories; more nuanced approaches that capture continuity and discontinuity with past and present socioeconomic processes are necessary. Attention must be rebalanced toward understanding the deterioration of these neighborhoods if policymakers, planners and urban theorists are to obtain a comprehensive picture of poverty dynamics and appropriate interventions in African cities. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Recent urban geographic literature on urbanization in Africa has focused heavily on new urban development processes such as periurban expansion, gated communities, and the growth of new urban slums (Grant, 2009; Murray, 2011; Rakodi, 2005). In the context of slums, upgrading and renewal efforts and critiques of upgrading were central foci of urban policy until recently (Huchzermeyer, 2004). We can understand this tilt in research and policy attention based on rapid urbanization and the phenomenal growth in the size and area of contemporary African cities as well as by urban scholarly agendas to move beyond negative depictions of urbanization in the region. The intellectual draw toward newer areas and additions to the urban environment is not, however, without unintended consequences: one outcome is that it detracts attention away from the older city. Particularly worrisome is that processes of deterioration and urban decay in other parts of the built environment appear to be expanding as well as enlarging (KonaduAgyemang, 2001; Oteng-Ababio, 2011; Owusu, 2008). The

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.E. Melara Arguello). 0143-6228/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.apgeog.2012.04.012

stagnation that has set in upon informal settlement interventions has further marginalized any fresh thinking about urban deterioration (Huchzermeyer, 2004). We call for greater reflection on contemporary research concentrations, and posit that core parts of the residential geography of African cities are being glossed over. Neighborhood change is poorly understood as well as understudied in contemporary urban Africa. In the past, neighborhoods were key spatial containers for understanding urban dynamics (Brand, 1972; Konadu-Agyemang, 2001; Pellow, 2008) but they became unfashionable for study with the ushering in of globalization processes. Understanding neighborhood change has never been so incomplete: attention gravitates at the extremes to gated communities and slums. While some scholars have gone to great lengths to explain greater diversity and divergence among neighborhoods in contemporary urban Africa, the majority of researchers have too easily assumed convergence and similar trajectories in the globalization era, albeit acknowledging considerable variation between income cohorts. Agyei-Mensah and Owusu (2009) astutely highlight greater diversity among residential areas and multiple trajectories even within general economic cohorts of such lower-income neighborhoods. They point to divergent urban trajectories within lowincome neighborhoods and illustrate that indigenous low-income neighborhoods are different from their immigrant counterparts.

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Moreover, they demonstrate that the notion of traditional indigenous areas needs updating: more ethnic mixing has taken place and more affluent indigenes have relocated from these areas but still hold onto strong attachments to their old neighborhood. Early macro efforts to understand neighborhood change in the urban African context were crude and stylized. Models of land-use and change in the African city (Aryeetey-Attoh, 1997; Myers, 2011) are not in themselves relevant for assessing the complexity of contemporary urban dynamics, the relationality among urban zones and the fluidity and circulations among African urbanites (Dierwechter, 2004; Simone, 2010). Urban land-use models typically distinguish among residential areas in terms of income cohorts (upper income, lower income, middle income) and in terms of immigrant enclaves (referred to as zongos, or stranger’s zones) and non-immigrant residential areas. These models are too limited and dated to be relevant to the contemporary situation and were put forward before the proliferation of slums. A different approach, remote sensing, presents a more dynamic visualization of urban change: this bird’s eye approach uses vegetation cover, dwelling density and dwelling configurations to document change over time as a surrogate to measure neighborhood change and the spread of “slumness,” and evidence of downgrading (Stoler, Daniels, & Weeks, 2012; Weeks, Hill, Stow, Getis, & Fugate, 2007). These approaches focus on observed physical features within neighborhoods and are useful in highlighting large-scale changes but they are less relevant for explaining change on the ground in individual neighborhoods. More robust knowledge about processes of urbanization, neighborhood change and urban poverty is needed urgently (Gulyani & Bassett, 2007; UN-HABITAT, 2010). A UN-HABITAT report (2010, p. 2) stresses that insufficient data on urban Africa is perpetuating a “knowledge vacuum, resulting in uninformed policy or decision-making, or the wrong scale or focus” where outdated neighborhood profiles remain unexamined. The full extent of urban poverty may not be well captured. By some estimates 43% of Africa’s urban populations exist below national poverty lines (UNHABITAT, 2010, p. xi). Updating information and context-specific observation has been all too infrequent in older neighborhoods in particular. We want to draw attention to indigenous neighborhoods that may not be slums by UN definitions as tenure is secured for many, but where housing stock and infrastructure have been downgraded, so much that they require closer inspection. The decay of older traditional neighborhoods according to standard slum criteria (tenure insecurity, high population and housing density, poor layout, poor access to water and sanitation services) may be a new urban reality. We focus on urban downgrading as a physical deterioration (that can be rapid) in the housing stock and other socioeconomic infrastructure within a neighborhood. Downgrading can be initiated by processes of transfers of dwellings between housing submarkets (a switch from owner-occupied to rental status) as well as downshifts in the physical conditions of owner-occupied dwellings that occur when homeowners are unable to afford the costs of upgrading and required maintenance. However, economic factors alone cannot explain the downgrading predicament in traditional neighborhoods. Owusu (2008) highlights how economic conditions and culture mesh in very complex ways in residential neighborhoods and the cultural milieu can be critical in shaping the dynamics of neighborhood change. Mindful of symbiotic connections, we engage with the indigenous neighborhood through an examination of the interplay of economic and cultural dynamics. Our study is situated in Accra, Ghana e a city where the indigenous imprint on urban geography is significant (Otiso & Owusu, 2008). We focus on a traditional, non-informal neighborhood e Korle Gonno (hereafter referred to as “KG”). Our concentration on this neighborhood was shaped by the partnership between the

Millennium Cities Initiative1 and the municipal authority, where the latter requested an up-to-date settlement profile of KG given its rapid state of physical, environmental and economic deterioration that rival more researched “informal” communities such as Old Fadama, Nima and Sabon Zongo (Grant & Oteng-Ababio, 2012; Owusu, 2008; Pellow, 2008). The latter communities have rightfully received local, national and international development agencies’ attention, as they struggle with multiple challenges (environmental, overcrowding, infrastructural, etc.). Yet, the current focus on informal settlements may be cultivating a misinformed perception that old neighborhoods such as KG, with secure tenure and a grid layout, are not in urgent need of intervention. Re-examining these neighborhoods is imperative, with critical implications for city managers as well as their respective populations. Importantly, the presence and expansion of informal settlements, while worthy of the recent emphases, is not the only form of urban poverty in African cities; understanding the dynamics of decline of traditional neighborhoods is an essential part of piecing together the typologies of urban poverty. Only by assembling comprehensive and more extensive information on poverty can urban managers be better informed about how to address needs and allocate scarce resources for intervention. Our paper is structured as follows. The next section discusses the framing of neighborhood change as a continuity as well as discontinuity, followed by a brief background on the development in KG and the methodology employed in the study. The third section presents the results of the research followed by a discussion that assesses the layers of complexity behind KG’s gradual decline and its implication for practitioners and theorists on neighborhood change. The conclusion examines a way forward in how to place such dynamics in context with a broader citywide upgrading initiative. How do traditional neighborhoods fit within the context of changing contemporary African cities? There is widespread agreement that the residential geography of the twenty-first century African city differs spatially from the city of the mid-twentieth century and from the colonial city that preceded it. The combined forces of globalization are often portrayed as resulting in a new city in the making (Simone, 2004). However, all too often static understandings of indigenous residential areas are assumed and researchers have been more attentive to assessing residential neighborhood change in other specific contexts e.g. older slums (Agyei-Mensah & Owusu, 2009) and particular inner-city contexts such as immigrant Johannesburg (Murray, 2008, 2011) and tenements in Nairobi (Huckzermeyer, 2011). The latter high-rise inner-city contexts are not comparable with low-rise Accra. Moreover, we posit that traditional areas are heterogeneous and centrally located indigenous residential communities that will obviously be articulated quite differently from a more remotely located indigenous community. Place matters and city life is assembled by different people in different contexts (Simone, 2010), but this kind of nuanced thinking has not been applied to update understandings of the urban trajectories of different types of indigenous residential areas. Although Simone (2004) has not studied traditional residential areas per se, he has detailed newer coping dynamics within contemporary urban African environments that are reflective of an

1 The Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI), a project of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, assists selected sub-Saharan cities in their efforts to attain the Millennium Development Goals through systematic research, analysis and targeted interventions that identify, quantify and seek to fill critical gaps in public service delivery, civil infrastructure and the business and investment environment.

J.E. Melara Arguello et al. / Applied Geography 36 (2013) 23e30

amalgamation of demographic transitions; changing social networks; and shifts in labor market dynamics arising from major components of urban economies become more articulated within global circuits and large parts remaining excluded. A key argument he makes is that traditional residential areas are increasingly integrated into wider processes and into an urban space economy that extends well beyond the confines of the residential neighborhood boundary. Associational life under these conditions is put under immense strains and cohesion found in established social traditions (Simone, 2004; Simone and Abouhani, 2005) breaks down as urbanites struggle to survive within the context of interlinked deprivations. Interlinked deprivations that constitute urban poverty in traditional neighborhoods include: inadequate and often unstable income; inadequate and unstable or risky asset bases; deteriorating housing conditions (e.g. overcrowding); more fragile safety nets in the contexts of increased population pressures and the outmigration of wealthier community members to suburban locations; and the current arm’s-length community engagement between these wealthy members and more powerless and voiceless groups (often the non-natives and the most recent immigrants). Downgrading of the housing stock is a very visible manifestation of this changed urban context. At the same time we do not want to overemphasize change. Older African traditional residential areas have important continuities and legacies from the past. Layers of urban residential patterns laid out in earlier periods are altered, but change proceeds on top, beside and beyond existing layers (Beauregard & Haila, 2000). There are important continuities in the built environment and its infrastructure that constrain all contemporary additions, adjustments and re-configurations (Pellow, 2008). Furthermore, neighborhood attachment for many but not all residents is still rooted in indigenous cultural traditions and lived experiences, even though social capital may be more in flux than ever before in poor urban communities (Grant, 2010; Kondau-Agyemang, 1991). We therefore call for more attention to highly complex meshworks of old and new forces in traditional neighborhoods. We no longer expect traditional neighborhood boundaries to delimit nor bound residents, and traditional residential areas should no longer be ignored and viewed in isolation from wider urban dynamics and processes. We think it is useful to assess traditional residential area change through poverty analysis that is widely applied to studying urban slums (Grant, 2009; Kondau-Agyemang, 1991). Slums and traditional residential areas share similar physical characteristics, and social bonds are critical for urban survival in both. But there are important differences between slums and traditional residential areas. One central difference is that one ethnic group generally predominates in traditional areas while this is seldom the case in slums. Furthermore, indigenous cultural affinity and attachment to traditional residential areas is also shared by urban non-resident members of these communities, creating a unique but important arm’s-length urban dynamic. In contrast, slum dwellers maintain ties to rural villages but rural village life is orientated intermittently around urban slums (there can be incidences when chiefs send signals to the youth about deviant urban behavior e see Grant, 2009) but for the most part urban slums and rural villages operate at greater distances. Viewed in this context, traditional neighborhoods require unpacking within the contemporary contexts of urban poverty and downgrading. Materials and methods The study area: Korle Gonno KG is one of the indigenous Ga communities (along with James Town, Osu, La and Ussher Town) located at the heart of Accra. Most

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of the residents are of Ga ethnicity but recently the area has attracted many economic refugees from other ethnicities. Apart from its central location with sea views and close proximity to the CBD, two prominent employment hubs are situated within the area: Korle Bu Hospital (the most prominent hospital in Ghana) and the Tuesday market (a food/petty trade market that functions within and around permanent buildings) (See Fig. 1). KG is also a culturally important area for the Ga, functioning as a cultural magnet (Pellow, 2001). Operating as a central organizing feature for social life, it draws in Ga for births, funerals, cultural festivals, etc. The cultural attachment is not only for community residents but also for non-resident Ga, located in other parts of Accra, but who trace their ancestry to their “family home”. Cultural traditions have pivoted around KG and have been maintained in time and space. For example, fisher-folk who were the first settlers in the area do not engage in fishing on Tuesday, the day the sea god (naa) rests, and this tradition has been preserved. Furthermore, members of the ethnic group from all over Accra will converge on the area to celebrate the annual Homowo (harvest) festival that is led by traditional priests. Local opinion portrayed KG in the past as a vibrant social and economic vicinity, attracting a variety of recreational activities along the then-clean, serene coconut-lined beach where couples and new lovers alike have uninterrupted past-times (Dakubu, 1997). Others also recount the sweet memories about the adjacent Korle Lagoon, where tourists watched fishermen briskly and busily at work (Parker, 2000). The population of KG has grown steady from 8300 in 1958 (GoG, 1958) to approximately 27,826 in 2000 (GSS, 2000), with a projected population of 44,088 by 2008 and population density of 1000 people per hectare (AMA, 2009, p. 8). There is much reason to suspect that the community’s population has greatly exceeded the 50,000 mark. In terms of ethnicity, most residents (about 70e80%) remain predominantly indigenous Ga. Although current data on the population dynamics of the area is non-existent (the last published population census was in 2000), there is much evidence to suspect that much of the growth in the area will be accounted for by natural increase as teenage pregnancy appears rife, an observation which resonates with studies in other Ga communities (Razzu, 2005). KG today reflects a pale shadow of its cherished past. Many houses, particularly along the eastern boundary, are in very poor condition and deteriorating rapidly. Even the once-beautiful, welldesigned two-story buildings have severely deteriorated. Illegal, frail and temporary structures are more common features of the built environment. The community is now extremely overcrowded (average 6e9 persons per room), compromising privacy in all its facets. Places for cooking, bathing and toileting are in dire need of maintenance. Although there are few “public” toilets within the community, many would rather use the “free range” (open spaces) system including the drains, gutters and the beachfront in order to avoid cost. A study by CHF International (2010) lists KG as a “high poverty pocket,” in terms of income levels. A “high poverty pocket” in using income as criteria is defined as income levels of $1e2 dollars per day. We posit that the KG situation can be more worrisome and chronic against the back drop that most of these official statistics generally undercount people ‘living under poverty’ as the methodology used (i.e. estimates of cost of food needed to meet nutritional requirements) normally exclude those related to housing such as access to waste and sanitation (UNICEF, 2002). Thus, fallaciously, one is assumed not to be poor once the income rises above the poverty level, without recognizing intra and interurban income differentials needed to avoid being within the poverty net. The dilemma is perhaps how to ascertain the circumstances that produced incentives for a once vibrant society to experience what

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Fig. 1. The study area: Korle Gonno.

Razzu (2005) defines as “paradoxical poverty”, a situation where a society is very poor in material and infrastructure terms but rich in other critical resources. Methodology This paper draws from a broader study of the degeneration of KG undertaken by the Millennium Cities Initiative in collaboration with University of Ghana (Full report will be available soon). The fieldwork employed a mixed-methods approach, and included a structured questionnaire survey in August 2011 of 254 households. The survey specifically sought answers about respondents’ general background information, water conditions, sanitation and waste management practices as well as general environmental sanitation. There were also selected focus group discussions with the youth of the community and unstructured interview schedules with policymakers including senior citizens, influential public servants and the elected assembly official. These complementary sources of data were analyzed based on the various themes outline for the study and integrated into the overall analysis. Further, 84 business firm interviews were also conducted to gather information about their operations including some prospects and challenges. The sampling design involved a proportional stratification based on the gridded system of the Town and Country Planning Department, which incidentally coincided with the current observed differences in physical condition (decay) of housing and access to other social infrastructure services. Based on the observed conditions the area was demarcated into four zones, Zone 1 being the most deprived in terms of infrastructure provision and having the largest concentration of dilapidated housing stock. The population density in each stratum informed the apportioning of the sample with adjustments for some obvious economic activities and in some cases the views of tenants. Accordingly, 70 households were selected from Zones 1 and 4 each while 55 households were selected for Zones 2 and 3 each. Within each zone, the fourth house on each side of all streets in the community was

chosen, and within each house a simple random sampling technique was chosen for the household questionnaire. The head of each household e or where applicable, the family head e was the prime target. This was done to account for Ga cultural norms, whereby houses are typically inhabited by an extended family, with the eldest member being the head. This however does not commit the “Head” to any liability for the sustenance of the entire extended family. In practice, this meant that in the absence the head of family, the head of household was interviewed or vice-versa. When both were present they were given the choice as to who would become the respondent. On a few occasions where none was available, any elderly member of the household available was interviewed. This partly explains the high response rate of almost 100 percent. Results: explaining KG’s downgrading Using our field data, we illustrate the physical, economic and social dimensions of neighborhood change that has taken place in KG. The physical dimension presents information on overcrowding, quality of and access to water, sanitation and waste management services. The economic dimension shows the shift in the economic landscape and its effect on the local labor market and livelihood survival strategies. The social dimension reflects effects that the physical and economic dimensions have had on cultural traditions (if any) and social network dynamics. Physical dimension: crowding Generally, in low-income areas, overcrowding is measured by persons per room (i.e. more than 2 persons per room and/or 5 square meters per individual) (UN HABITAT 2003, p. 12), in contrast to the situation in most developed states where it is measured by rooms per person. Our results reveal KG as one of the overpopulated neighborhoods in Accra with a mean number of households per house of 6.4, a figure surpassing the national average of

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5.1 (Ghana Statistical Service, 2008). Table 1 shows a mean persons per room (PPR) estimate of 5.1 as captured in the survey sample.2 These finding resonate with a Bank of Ghana (2007) study that proposed that acute overcrowding takes place when the numbers converge toward 8.7 persons living in each housing unit. We explain this development on the basis of both natural population growth e families expanding e and rising numbers of tenant arrangements. Water, sanitation & waste management services Site inspection of houses during the survey revealed that many of them had an in-situ water tap and meter. Overall, 78 percent of survey respondents had access to a water tap for drinking, which qualifies as an improved water source (see Fig. 2). These statistics, however, only tell part of the story, as water access within a house may not be equal for all households. Observations from KG show that these figures can give a misleading impression of the standard and availability of services since social propinquity may be different from social accessibility (Phillip, 1984). In KG, the head household owns the water tap, and other members of the households e including family members and tenants e typically have to use the “pay-as-you-go” system, where they pay for water use. The findings revealed that typically, a bucket of water costs 5 pesewas (US 3 cents), while bathing directly using the in-house shower costs 20e30 pesewas (US 12e17 cents). This practice is ultimately pricing out a number of household members, and therefore limiting their access to potable water and compelling them to use other unhygienic alternatives. The situation contravenes the acceptable WHO standards for human health and welfare, which stipulate that when access to water is within 1 km (0.62 miles) of a dwelling (i.e. 30 min to collect water), the average consumption is 20 L (5 gallons) per day per person.3 Sanitation Sanitation management is particularly problematic in KG, if for no other reason that the fact that a sewerage network was never installed. As with access to water supply, inequalities in access to toilet facilities are related to household wealth. Pit latrines are common in low-income households, while flush toilets dominate higher-wealth groups. Our studies also show that under economic duress or the need to house other relatives, many family heads have converted washrooms/toilets to bedrooms, effectively worsening access to in-house toilet facilities. Nevertheless, the findings show that 55% of respondents had in-house toilet facilities (see Fig. 3). However, like the water situation, the statistics are very deceptive and incomplete as the presence the facility does not necessarily equate access. Such a decision remains the discretion of the family head. During a focus group discussion, participants unanimously confirmed that many of them have to rely, at best, on public toilets for their sanitation needs, even though they have WCs in their respective homes. Two main reasons for this: the issue of water and who pays the bills; and the cost of dislodging the liquid waste when full. Waste management In general, there is much room for improvement in solid waste management for KG, given that road access is not an issue for waste vehicles and that each house, technically, can have its refuse picked up at its doorstep. The issue lies less with layout and much more with affordability and value for money. Residents revealed a strong

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Table 1 Persons per room (PPR) among survey respondents (Source: Field data, 2011). Statistic

1st Quartile

2nd Quartile

3rd Quartile

4thQuartile

Total sample

Minimum Maximum Mean Standard deviation

1.0 1.8 1.3 0.3

1.8 2.9 2.3 0.3

2.5 6.3 4.4 0.9

6.3 26.0 12.4 5.6

1.0 26.0 5.1 5.2

78%

Tap water is present in the house

22%

No tap water is present in the house

Fig. 2. Presence of tap water in house (Source: Field data, 2011).

sense of dissatisfaction with the current level of service provision and that the quality is not worth the monthly fee. Residents indicated their willingness to pay a fair price for improved services. This implies residents were hardly involved in instituting the current arrangements e a symptom of bad governance (Oteng-Ababio, 2010). Economic dimension: the labor market and employment Over time, the local economy has transitioned from primarily fishing-based to survivalist entrepreneurship in mainly retailing. The establishment of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, a major employer in the healthcare sector in Accra, has spurred the growth of healthcare-related ancillary services and retail shops along the corridor where the hospital is situated within KG. Interviews with key stakeholders indicate, however, that there is very little opportunity for employment or entrepreneurship for the neighborhood’s labor force; business owners and/or managers attributed this to lack of qualifications. Our findings do not contradict their assertions, as 44% of unemployed survey respondents had not completed senior high school, which is a basic requirement for most “formal sector” jobs. Additionally, lack of qualifications and insufficient access to start-up capital also came to the fore. The largest employers in the area are the “resort clubs” along the beach, but they can employ only a minute amount of the labor force and offer low-paying jobs. Most of the economically active persons in KG are self-employed without employees, as Fig. 4 illustrates. Such activities, for the most part, are considered informal economic activities. Household interviews revealed that there was a preference for entrepreneurship over employment, as income prospects are perceived to be greater. Many find work in street trade, sales of provisions, and artisanship such as masonry and electrical repair (see Fig. 5).

55%

Toilet facility is present in the house

45%

No toilet facility is present in the house

2

Our mean PPR of 5.1 from the survey should not be confused with the national households per house average of 5.1 (Ghana Statistical Service, 2008). 3 http://www.ifpri.org/media/water2025.htm.

Fig. 3. Presence of toilet facility in all houses surveyed (Source: Field data, 2011).

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part due to KG remaining predominantly a Ga ethnic neighborhood. Relatively new on the social fabric of KG is the poor levels of educational attainment and recent trends in residential mobility, as described below.

60 50

Percent

40 30 20 10 0 Public Private sector firm sector firm

SelfSelfDaily wage employed employeed labor with without employees employees

Fig. 4. Nature of employment among survey respondents (Source: Field data, 2011).

Many of these enterprises are home-based e 63% of survey respondents under the “self-employed without employees” category worked from home. These enterprises also allow opportunities for bartering, credit among neighbors, and means of improving social networks via gift-giving. However, interviewees lamented that their profits were grossly insufficient, or that they were involved in “smallesmall” business, such as “sand-winning” (selling bags of sand from the beach to masons for sandcrete) and truckpushing. Such activities reflect a stifling business climate, where firm growth and expansion is extremely difficult due to reasons such as saturation of certain economic activities (e.g. hairdressing, tailoring, sales of provisions) and insufficient start-up capital. Social dimension Ga cultural traditions as mentioned earlier in this article continue to be practiced, and social ties remain strong, no doubt in

80 70 60 50

Percent

40 30 20 10 0 Artisan

Petty trading Wholesale trading

Other

Fig. 5. Nature of work among self-employed without employees (Source: Field data, 2011).

Educational attainment KG is endowed with a number of educational facilities, both private and public; pre-school, primary, junior and secondary highs; as well as vocational training establishments. Notwithstanding these facilities, the rate of school attendance in the settlement is not encouraging. Fig. 6 shows educational attainment among the total survey sample. Forty-five percent of survey respondents completed junior high school (JHS) as their last level of education, and 27 percent completed senior high school (SHS). In general, education levels among residents of KG are low, with many not having completed senior high school. The reasons for dropping out of school, as revealed by focus group discussants, include the inability or unwillingness of parents (or students themselves) to pay for tuition and class expenses; pregnancy and child delivery during enrollment in JHS; discouragement by the unemployment rate among high school graduates; and taking care of sick parents or grandparents. Re-enrollment for the majority of drop-outs is difficult to impossible, due to the lack of capital and/or time, or incentive. By implication, many of the people in KG appear cut off from formal employment. Residential mobility Residential mobility in KG, for the most part, is seen among better-educated and affluent members who move out of their family house for a number of reasons, including dissatisfaction with the lack of upgrading of municipal services, quarrels among family members, and complacency about the state of decline of KG. A respondent commented during an interview, “those with the means to move out of KG usually do. Why stay here?” (personal interview, July 20th, 2011). By implication, the most financially challenged within the community are left to their fate in their traditional enclave. Discussion Overall, the data on KG illustrates that it has some dimensions of poverty (low educational attainment and literacy, lack of sewerage, overcrowding, income poverty, etc.) comparable with the informal settlements of Accra. Crowding conditions (evolved mostly through natural population growth), the deterioration of key municipal services (e.g. sanitation) and lacking economic opportunities compel better-skilled individuals in the community to disembark from their family house to invest in housing in more affluent neighborhoods (some distance away) rather than invest in their family houses. Those without means to relocate remain in KG. The coping strategies they adopt to deal with their daily crises may, in turn, hold health risks, especially where residents resort to open defecation and illegal dumping of solid waste into open spaces, which may clog drains and cause flooding. This resonates with the findings of Sanai (2002) who sees housing adjustment as attempts to accommodate changing housing needs through residential mobility, including migration and intra-urban mobility, albeit his studies examined the number of rooms occupied by compound dwellers in Kumasi in general, not necessarily a traditional enclave as in KG. One of the most striking findings of our survey is that official statistics tend to overstate access to urban services (water, in-house toilet facilities, etc) and thus create misleading impression of urban improvements. The local reality is that most residents have to pay for these in-house facilities before accessing them and there are

J.E. Melara Arguello et al. / Applied Geography 36 (2013) 23e30

10%

1%

29

12% Did not attend school

5% Primary and or Junior High School Senior High or Technical School Vocational Training Tertiary Education

27% 45%

Postgraduate Education

Fig. 6. Educational attainment among survey respondents (Source: Field data, 2011).

others that are virtually cut off and deprived from using these services. The neighborhood’s decline in environmental sanitation has adversely impacted the economic potential of at least two of its centers of economic activity: the Tuesday Market, and the gradually emerging tourism/hospitality businesses along the beach. This, along with the poor development of skilled labor integration with the hospital, gives few opportunities for the burgeoning labor force and exacerbates income poverty. Income poverty, in turn, was the key factor behind parents’ inability to keep their children in schools past Junior High School, itself a necessary credential for entry into formal work. The lack of qualifications among young adults entering the labor force was a key factor behind them engaging in survival labor such as sand-winning and truck-pushing, or earning money illegally through the drug trade or prostitution, a situation reminiscent of squatters of Mogoditshane (Botswana), who according to Shabane, Nkambwe, and Chanda (2011) are saddled with poverty, have limited choices and few opportunities to advance themselves or improve their well-being. The lack of investment by public and private sectors (as well as the more affluent indigenes) in upgrading the community has exacerbated its deterioration. We see with the case of KG that using slum profiling techniques (e.g. indicators) is a useful tool to capture certain poverty dimensions (particularly income poverty and physical deterioration of the built environment) in traditional neighborhoods but does not go far enough to illuminate the trajectories of urban poverty in neighborhoods such as KG. We observe layers of continuity and discontinuity in KG in the form of enduring sociocultural traditions and changes in the economic landscape, coupled with deteriorating physical conditions in the community. Continuity is evidenced in the family house being the foundation of Ga familial identity (and their refusal to sell their land), and social networks still very much rooted in Ga traditions. Further, within these social networks are business ties that are essential for residents’ livelihoods. Discontinuity is observed in the diminished role of economic activities that were central to Ga communities (fishing) in light of the emergence of other sectors tied to the broader urban economy, such as healthcare. As business ties are by and large embedded at neighborhood scale, there have been challenges in integrating the indigene labor force in KG to these emerging economic networks. This limits potential for upward mobility both within the informal economic sector and into formal sector work. Increasing entry into petty street trade may be a coping strategy to adjust to the changing economic landscape. The lack of any workforce development programs by national or local government contributed to

the fragmentation of the indigene labor force from the emerging economic activities, and has in part contributed to a form of localized spatial mismatch. Conclusion There is a glaring knowledge gap around the downgrading of traditional indigenous urban neighborhoods in African cities. Our research, including surveys and interviews of residents in KG, reveals many residents’ challenges are as severe as some of the most deprived informal settlements in the city. This condition in effect widens the scale and magnitude of urban poverty in Accra and needs immediate planning and policy attention. Housing and migration pressures have stretched the community’s infrastructure services (housing, water, and sanitation) to a near breaking point. Worse yet are educational attainment levels, unemployment and underemployment, particularly among the youth, which cannot be effectively addressed with housing and infrastructure upgrading projects alone. Keeping the city free from urban ethnic tensions and violence that has surfaced in other African cities has to be an important priority, and local indigenes will be a highly sensitive urban citizenry. We hope that our preliminarily research effort on KG will be successful in raising the attention of local community leaders, policymakers, NGOs and the international development community to the issue of urban downgrading in inner-city residential environments. Our research echoes other scholars’ findings that quantitative indicators in slum profiling techniques are highly unsatisfactory as stand-alone assessments (Baker & Schuler, 2004; Garau, Sclar, & Carolini, 2005). We think it is highly useful to bring in new techniques and spatial mapping that can spot neighborhood change from the air (Weeks et al., 2007) but we do not want to lose sight of the social and economic complexity on the ground. Macro approaches have their strengths but they are handicapped in their abilities to infer the trajectories of urban poverty (Baker & Schuler, 2004; Stoler et al., 2012). Neighborhood dynamics are very complex, and downgrading and the urban employment spatial mismatch in traditional poor neighborhoods are critical contemporary developments. Moreover, the various layers of sociocultural continuity in the face of economic discontinuity will pose one of the greatest challenges to local urban planners, policymakers and urban theorists. Accounting for these issues in profiling tools (such as survey questionnaires) can yield dramatically improved information for city upgrading and economic development programs.

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