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作者

Lara Esther Bartels

来源

URBAN GEOGRAPHY,Vol.41,Issue4,P.524-549

语言

英文

关键字

Informal settlement,consolidation,practices,land access,middle class,peri-urban

作者单位

Governance and Sustainability Lab, Faculty of Regional and Environmental Sciences, Trier University , Trier, Germany

摘要

Informal settlements are often equated with slums emerging at urban fringes and inhabited by the poor. This article contributes to revising this common narrative by drawing on rich empirical material about the involvement of the middle class in constructing P&T, an informal, peri-urban settlement in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), Ghana. Drawing on the concept of “quiet encroachment”, it is shown that the non-collective and quiet practices of encroaching illegally onto State land is an ordinary practice of the middle class to acquire land for shelter in P&T. The middle class can draw on various practices and mechanisms to consolidate their “quiet encroachment”. It is argued that through such practices, the middle class shapes the processes of (informal) peri-urbanization in the GAMA. The article calls for further empirical studies on informal peri-urban settlements constructed by the middle class to deepen the understanding of inequalities embedded in (informal) peri-urbanization. KEYWORDS: Informal settlementconsolidationpracticesland accessmiddle classperi-urban Acknowledgments I gratefully acknowledge the continued support of Antje Bruns, without whose support this study would not have been possible. I am also grateful for the constructive comments of Abubakari Ahmed, Rossella Alba, Sara Larijani, David Simon, and the three anonymous reviewers of Urban Geography in earlier versions of this article. I am thankful to Alexander Kammerer who digitized the orthophotos and supported me in producing the maps in this article, and for the helpful advice of Achim Röder. I also would like to thank Rossella Alba, Kingsley Baffoe and Kofi Owusu for their passionate support during the fieldwork. I am, furthermore, in debt to the people of P&T. I am in particular grateful to the support of TK. A preliminary version of this article was presented at the final conference of the MCRI Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century in Toronto in October 2017. I am thankfully acknowledge the comments of the participants. This study forms part of “WaterPower”, a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the reference number [01 LN 1316 A]. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [01 LN 1316 A]. Correction Statement This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.