Gated communities and land administration challenges in Ghana: reappraising the reasons why people move into gated communities

Abstract

Gated communities are proliferating in most developing countries. Scholars, however, continue to rely on mainstream demand-based arguments mostly framed in developed countries to explain this phenomenon, without giving sufficient attention to context-specific factors. Presenting the case of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area in Ghana and using household surveys and key informant interviews, this article emphasizes Ghana’s land administration challenges and demonstrates how these challenges influence people’s reasons to move into gated communities. Using principal component analysis, our results show that land administration challenges significantly influenced the decisions of households living in inner-city gated communities relative to their counterparts in peri-urban areas. However, in peri-urban areas, both mainstream demand-based arguments and land administration challenges were equally influential. Household and expert interviews illuminate our results. Although, empirically, this paper focuses on Ghana, the importance of the land factor and its spatio-temporal dimension has considerable resonance elsewhere, as scholars across the globe grapple with understanding why gated communities continue apace.

Keywords:

• land administration challenges; mainstream demand-based arguments; inner-city; peri-urban

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge Mr. Isaac Esselfie Whyte for his immense assistance during the fieldwork. We are also grateful to the four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the first draft. Finally, we are grateful to Franklin Obeng-Odoom and other colleagues in Cambridge who read earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Lands Commission is a statutory body established by Article 258 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana and the Lands Commission Act, 2007 (Act 767) to among other things, survey, map, appraise, register and manage state and vested lands on behalf of government (Ehwi & Asante, 2016).

2 Landguardism is the phenomenon of employing constituted groups of mainly young persons who engage in the use of illegitimate force to protect landed property in exchange for remuneration in cash or in kind (see Darkwa & Attuquayefio, 2012; Morrison, 2017).

3 In this paper, our analysis centres on the LACs in Ghana and the MDAs. The influence of household demographic and socio-economic characteristics would be analysed in a separate paper. For example, in some types of gated communities in the USA, namely retirement villages and country clubs, only people aged above 45 years are admitted (McKenzie, 1994). We examine this contention in the Ghanaian context.

4 The Ghana Cedi – US dollar exchange rate as at March 30, 2018 was Ghc 1 = US$0.23.

5 ‘Oyibi residents live in fear as armed robbers have field day’ (Graphic Online, Assessed 1 March 2018 at https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/oyibi-residents-live-in-fear-as-armed-robbers-have-field-day.html).

6 Tema: Armed robbers Terrorizing Residents of Hallelujah (Modern Ghana, Assessed 20 March 2018 at https://www.modernghana.com/news/838410/tema-armed-robbers-terrorizing-residents-of-hallelujah.html).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research primarily came from the Humanities and Social Science Fieldwork Grant (University of Cambridge) with other funding from the Cambridge Trust, the Smuts Memorial Fund and the Cambridge Political Economy Society (CPES).

Notes on contributors

Richmond Juvenile Ehwi

Richmond Juvenile Ehwi is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research (CCHPR) in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. He researches on gated communities, land administration, smart cities and digitisation of urban planning.

Nicky Morrison

Nicky Morrison is Professor of Planning at Western Sydney University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. She is a leading academic authority on overcoming barriers to securing affordable housing and ways to deliver sustainable communities and inclusive growth through participatory planning practices. She has attracted major competitive external funding from the European Commission, Norwegian, German, UK, and Chinese governments and Amnesty International. In 2019, the Royal Town Planning Institute commended Nicky for her leadership and significant contribution to the planning profession.

Peter Tyler

Peter Tyler is Professor in urban and regional economics in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge and Fellow at St. Catharine’s College. He has an extensive track record in undertaking research with a particular emphasis on the evaluation of public policy. He has been an Expert Advisor to the OECD, European Commission and HM Government. During 2016 he was an Expert Advisor to UN Habitat III.