State Planning and Urban Life in Western Ghana, 1900-1970

FAIN: FEL-257933-18

Nathan Plageman
Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC 27109-6000)

A book-length study of Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana’s first planned city, under both British and Ghanaian rule.

My work provides a longitudinal study of Sekondi-Takoradi: a small coastal settlement that became the West African nation of Ghana’s principal port and first “planned city.” It was a constant site of top-down urban planning: following its design by the colonial state, the city went through five master plans and near constant revision by British and Ghanaian authorities. Instead of examining officials’ efforts, I probe how its swelling population—which grew from 4,100 people in 1900 to 120,000 in 1960—navigated and shaped its regimented confines. As a social historian committed to unearthing ordinary peoples’ agency and experiences, I want to complicate our understanding of the city (and urban planning in modern Africa) by pursuing a big question: how did residents encounter and shape Ghana’s first “planned city” from 1900-70? In the process, I recover the city’s past as an assemblage of narratives oriented not around state visions, but the dynamic contours of everyday urban life.

Associated Products

A City of Words, a City of Song: Infrastructures of Belonging in Colonial Sekondi, c. 1900-1920 (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: A City of Words, a City of Song: Infrastructures of Belonging in Colonial Sekondi, c. 1900-1920
Author: Nate Plageman
Abstract: My paper focuses on Sekondi, a small port city that housed the first railway terminus of the West African colony of the Gold Coast. More specifically, it uses regular columns about the city that appeared in an African-owned newspaper (the Gold Coast Leader) to examine how "middle-class clerks and deskworkers used music and musical activities to imagine and experience a colonial city that did not yet exist.
Date: 10/20/2018
Conference Name: Cities at the Crossroads: The Ninth Biennial Urban History Association Conference

Building with Song: Musical Acts, Human Infrastructures, and City-Making in Colonial Sekondi, Gold Coast (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Building with Song: Musical Acts, Human Infrastructures, and City-Making in Colonial Sekondi, Gold Coast
Author: Nate Plageman
Abstract: This paper focuses on not state-strategies of colonial urban development, but on creative responses to it. Specifically, it examines how a group of middle-class clerks and civil servants reconceptualized and shaped Sekondi, a small port city that housed the first railway terminus of the West African colony of the Gold Coast. Using regular columns that appeared in an African-owned newspaper, I unearth how educated migrants from various parts of the Gold Coast, West Africa, and the Atlantic World "rebuilt" the city through musical and social activities. In the process, I challenge urban history's conviction that "real" city-building is a material process predominately driven by the state.
Date: 11/30/2018
Conference Name: Energies: Power, Creativity, and Afro-Futures, the 61st Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association

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