Collective Housing Provision in urban Ghana: negotiating the commons

With rapid urbanization, securing access to affordable and quality housing is becoming a key challenge for urban populations in Africa. Recent decades in Ghana have seen a boom in the real estate market, but it has mainly catered to upper-income groups, precluding low- and even middle-income groups from reliably securing a dwelling through market means. Coupled with no real housing policy from the Ghanaian state, this market gap has left large parts of the urban population relying on themselves to fulfill their housing needs. Many of these community-based and self-governed initiatives can be approached through the concept of “urban commons institutions” (UCIs), which are defined as collective arrangements supporting shared ownership and promoting community-building, as conditions for the de-commodification of social and human-nature relations. Successful collective action depends on the institutional architecture of the UCI, shaped by both endogenous and exogenous factors. This presentation, based on preliminary results from exploratory fieldwork in Accra and Kumasi, will outline some of the arrangements established by communities to collectively provide for their housing needs; with a more in-depth look at three case studies presenting institutional differences.