Migrant Communities in Accra: Marginalizing the Margins

Abstract

How can we understand a city in the era of globalization? Globalization researchers typically view the city as an economic system and concentrate on explaining the main circuits of capital. Such an economistic lens focuses attention on the command and control functions of global corporations, the (global) central business district, and specific (global) areas where producer and consumer services concentrate. As a direct result people only think of “slums” when they juxtapose run-down buildings against the glittering architecture of the global financial and services sector.

An earlier draft of this chapter was presented at an international seminar in commemoration of Accra’s centenary anniversary, “Migration and Urbanization — Effects on the Planned City and Its Environment,” October 14, 1998. The conference was co-sponsored by the Ghana Institute of Architects and the Goethe Institute. I subsequently presented this paper in the Globalization at the Margins series, organized by John Rennie Short and Richard grant, under the auspices of the Global Affairs Institute in Maxwell School, Syracuse University, on April 9, 1999.1 am grateful to the comments of Joseph Hayford, Don Mitchell, and Richard Grant.