| FEL-257933-18 | Research Programs: Fellowships | Nathan Plageman | State Planning and Urban Life in Western Ghana, 1900-1970 | 1/1/2018 - 8/31/2018 | $33,600.00 | Nathan | | Plageman | | | | Wake Forest University | Winston-Salem | NC | 27109-6000 | USA | 2017 | African History | Fellowships | Research Programs | 33600 | 0 | 33600 | 0 | 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. |