‘World Trade Center, Accra’: production of urban space for the continued peripheral linkage of Ghana under globalization

ABSTRACT

West Ridge in Accra, Ghana, a residential enclave for colonial administrators is being produced again to serve as the financial center of the country. The area is identified after one building: World Trade Center, Accra (WTCA). We map the transformation of WTCA and situate its emergence within three frameworks. We argue that the continued peripheral linkage of Ghana and the unwillingness of global capital to bear the overhead cost of extracting wealth from the country have created a vacuum for semi-peripheral, peripheral, and state capital to serve the financial needs of global capital. Ghana’s financial structural adjustment facilitated these processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Production of space
• circuits and networks of capital
• frontier urbanization
• speculative urbanism
• right to the city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian E. A. Yeboah

Ian Yeboah is a Professor of Geography at Miami University. His research and teaching are on globalization and Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on urbanization, migration, development and poverty.

John K. Maingi

John Maingi is an Associate Professor of Geography at Miami University. His teaching and research interests are in GIS/Remote Sensing, land use/land cover change, natural resource monitoring, management, and modeling, and vegetation dynamics.

Godwin Arku

Godwin Arku is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His research revolves around local impacts and community responses to global economic, social and environmental changes. Within this field, he looks at issues such as the cities' economic development policies, impacts of economic liberalization on housing markets, and economic reforms and built environment changes.