From a cluster of villages to a city: Housing politics and the dilemmas of spatial planning in Tamale, Ghana

This paper examines the growth trajectories of the city of Tamale, Ghana, using secondary data and archival material. It profiles the colonial planning experiences in the city and the way in which planning practices influenced collective actions in the pro-poor housing sector. The analyses show that at its founding in the early part of the 20th century, Tamale had a considerably large proportion of indigenous population whose housing practices fell beyond the scope of formal housing and planning regulations. Thus, moving people for purposes of redeveloping old indigenous housing clusters was the defining feature of colonial urban planning practices in the city. It is argued in this paper that the fragmented planning strategy adopted for the colonial city created an agglomeration of suburbs with poorly articulated spatial connectivity and a pattern of development which could not be easily predicted nor managed. To date, this pattern of spatial development continues to structure the housing politics in low-income sections of the city and offer part explanation to why housing demolitions have become fully entrenched in post-independent urban development programmes. The paper makes significant contributions by clarifying the exact mechanism through which colonial planning decisions were inscribed on the emergent city and the ways in which the attendant socioeconomic and spatial transformation processes have served to exclude the poor from the city space.