Infrastructural violence and urban development in African cities: The case of Takoradi Central Market in Ghana

Abstract

Cities in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are undergoing socio-spatial transformations, including mega retail/marketplace infrastructure projects. While often celebrated, these projects also present adverse socioeconomic and environmental consequences, which we illustrate by turning to the Takoradi Central Market (TCM) in Ghana as a case study. Herein, we deploy infrastructural violence as a lens to interrogate these consequences by probing the nature and forms of violence resulting from (re)developing the TCM and the underlying institutional logics, processes, and practices reproducing them. Our findings suggest that the forms of violence experienced by traders from the TCM redevelopment manifest through marginalization, abjection, and deprivation. More crucially, we illuminate that these embodied forms of violence from the TCM infrastructure are co-constitutive and structural. That is, they are reproduced through the country's prevailing institutional logic and practices around urban planning and development, including centralized and technocratic infrastructure planning processes that are deeply embedded in tokenistic/symbolic participatory planning and partisan politics.