Peri-Urbanisation and planning practice in Tamale, Ghana: a governmental perspective
Creators: name: AWEPUGA, Fauster
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330404
subject: Land use and environmental planning
classificationCode: 330410
subject: Urban analysis and development

description: Peri-urbanisation - a process of changing material and social conditions in areas surrounding established cities - poses a key challenge to contemporary debates about urbanisation and planning in Africa. This PhD thesis contributes to this debate by exploring the characteristics and limits of peri-urban planning practice in the context of Tamale (Ghana) through three interconnect tasks. First, it critiques prevailing ideas about the peri-urban concept and how these inform regimes of peri-urban planning and development in Africa. Second, it empirically examines the social production of peri-urban space in Tamale through the politics of everyday practices by which peri-urban dwellers negotiate challenges and opportunities of urban change. The third task then critiques how planning contributes to peri-urban development outcomes by interrogating the intersections between regimes of practices of planning and those of local communities. Ultimately, the thesis interrogates how and why peri-urban change in Tamale is unfolding in the way it is; the role that planning, as a governmental endeavour, plays in this process; and what lessons and insights this offers for practice and theory.

The conceptual and analytical gaps on the peri-urban phenomenon pose a major limitation to planning as an instrument of government which depends on knowledge to define problems and related interventions. Thus, this thesis adopts a critical social practice analytics lens. The object of analysis is peri-urban practice, which is constituted through multiple regimes of practices enacted by inhabitants and institutions through everyday actions and decisions. Specifically, the conjunction of Henry Lefebvre's dialectical approach to examining social space through social practice, and Michel Foucault's governmentality approach together allow an analysis of peri-urban change as it unfolds in and through multiple regimes of practices that constitute and are transform in society. As opposed to conventional approaches, which take a synoptic and reductionist conceptual viewpoint to reduce peri-urbanisation to material outcomes, this approach emphasises peri-urban transformations that re inherently linked to knowledge production and the exercise of power in the practices of governance. A case study research approach is used to collect and analyse field data through surveys and interviews with local community respondents, including households and community leaders and planning experts from the Tamale metropolitan area, in northern Ghana.

Overall, the findings offer three critical contributions to peri-urban planning practice and theory. First, this thesis responds to the need for better theorising about the peri-urban concept and African urbanism by providing an improved theoretical framework for analysing peri-urban change. This framework will offer other researchers vital analytical tools to identify and examine the constitutive elements and regimes of practices which interact and influence the production and governance of peri-urban space at a given place and time. Secondly, the empirical examination of Tamale extends the literature on peri-urbanisation. It offers new insights into how conditions in specific places and regimes of practice affect peri-urban development processes and growth trajectories. The Tamale case questions and exposes critical issues on what, how and whose interest is served by planning practice in a context where local chiefs together with private capitalist groups reappropriate plans at the expense of already marginalised households, smallholder farmers and petty traders. Thirdly, this research contributes to the critical planning and peri-urban literature by demonstrating the importance of everyday practice in peri-urban change and planning practice. It exposes issues often rendered invisible in traditional research yet crucial to peri-urban planning failures in Tamale and across Ghana and Africa broadly. The conclusion drawn based on the findings is that planning scholars need to better appreciate how peri-urbanisation is inseparable from the power/ knowledge relations through which people produce and experience space.