Obscured Innovations? Inventiveness in Collective Infrastructure Management in Accra, Ghana
Abstract
The discourse on urban innovations is largely positioned in the Global North, often conceived within the entrepreneurial and managerial forms of high-tech services and products. Unfortunately, the socio-spatial configuration and transformation of urban spaces by residents of informal cities in the Global South, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, are mostly left out of the urban innovation discourse. They are rather conceived by such nomenclature as primitive, chaotic, survivalist, and illogical. The myriad ways in which residents of informal cities confront their urban challenges and the granular forms of inventiveness in their everyday urban experiences are often ignored, subjugated, and obfuscated. This chapter argues that urban innovations are embedded in residents' inventiveness, which offers important opportunities for co-producing methodologies and mechanisms for inclusive and sustainable urban transformation. This chapter, therefore, unravels the socio-spatial constructs that underpin the specific collective mechanisms of infrastructure management in an indigenous informal settlement in Accra, Ghana. It demonstrates residents orderly and logical inventiveness in collective water and sanitation infrastructure provision and management as a form of urban social innovation. These efforts can undergird a didactic approach for planners and policymakers to co-produce socio-spatial configurations and transformation of informal cities inclusively and sustainably.
Publication Title
Informality and the City: Theories, Actions and Interventions
Recommended Citation
Okyere, S., Kofi Diko, S., Ebashi, M., & Kita, M. (2022). Obscured Innovations? Inventiveness in Collective Infrastructure Management in Accra, Ghana. Informality and the City: Theories, Actions and Interventions, 555-568. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99926-1_37
