Introduction
It is estimated that 60 per cent of Africans will live in urban areas by 2050. While urbanization seems to be an inevitable process driven by natural growth and rural–urban migration, the uniqueness of the process in Africa is its rapid rate, sprawl, and the gap between urbanization and urban planning (Ofoli et al. Reference Ofoli, Ablo and Wrigley-Asante2024; Yiran et al. Reference Yiran, Ablo, Asem and Owusu2020). In Ghana, Owusu (Reference Owusu2013) contended that urban planning lags behind urban growth, creating critical infrastructure deficits. As in other large African cities, the central areas of Ghana’s expanding capital city of Accra are characterized by land scarcity, pedestrians carrying out informal economic activity, traffic jams, pollution and a lack of housing (Asafo Reference Asafo2020; Buckley and Mathema Reference Buckley and Mathema2008). In their quest for urban living, many city dwellers, despite the infrastructural shortcomings, improvise their housing in low-income neighbourhoods (Arku et al. Reference Arku, Luginaah and Mkandawire2012; Yankson Reference Yankson, Ardayfio-Schandorf, Yankson and Bertrand2012). However, Ghana’s middle classes have grown in both size and purchasing power and increasingly seek comfortable living in private city development projects in Accra (Ablo Reference Ablo2024; Andreasen Reference Andreasen, Carmody and Murphy2024; Fält Reference Fält2019).
Previously, private property development in Accra mainly took the form of gated communities (Ehwi et al. Reference Ehwi, Morrison and Tyler2021; Yekple et al. Reference Yekple, Overå and Ablo2026), but it is now also emerging as entirely new master-planned satellite cities. This resonates with urban development trends in other parts of Africa over the last couple of decades (Côté-Roy and Moser Reference Côté-Roy and Moser2019; Watson Reference Watson2014). Typically unfolding on the city fringes, the ‘new cities’ are inserted into ‘rurban’ spaces (van Noorloos and Kloosterboer Reference van Noorloos and Kloosterboer2018). This form of ‘extended urbanism’ (Ghosh and Meer Reference Ghosh and Meer2021) transforms areas previously used for agriculture, displacing peri-urban dwellers (Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022; Ofoli et al. Reference Ofoli, Ablo and Wrigley-Asante2024) to benefit urban elites (Andres et al. Reference Andres, Bakare, Bryson, Khaemba, Melgaço and Mwaniki2021). Over the past decades, the number of private cities has seen a significant rise across the continent, including the Waterfall City in South Africa (Murray Reference Murray2015), Tatu City in Kenya (Splinter and Van Leynseele Reference Splinter and Van Leynseele2019) and the Appolonia City of Light in Ghana. Beyond the private cities are state-led urban fantasies, an aspiration towards world-class city status, like the Kenyan Vision 2030 initiative (Smith Reference Smith2017).
When placing high-class housing in the form of ‘elite enclaves’ (Watson Reference Watson2014) in largely poor communities in the urban periphery, developers and prospective property owners see spatial detachment (Waldman and Ghertner Reference Waldman and Ghertner2023) from people in these communities as necessary to avoid disturbing visual, physical and social contacts. Private cities, therefore, tend to be designed as comprehensively planned self-contained enclaves (van Noorloos and Kloosterboer Reference van Noorloos and Kloosterboer2018), detached from their surroundings by walls and gates, with strict regulations governing mobility, architecture, landscapes, and social and spatial interactions (Ablo Reference Ablo2023).
This detached form of urbanization – the building of urban spaces that are differentiated from the surrounding communities and society via housing and the unequal distribution of urban resources – can be understood as a process of ‘enclaving’. Nielsen et al. (Reference Nielsen, Sumich and Bertelsen2021: 884) suggest ‘considering enclaving as an aesthetics of imagination; a conduit for new urban imaginaries based on the idea of the materially segregated spatial unit’. Such imaginaries project visions of the future and shape how developers plan, design and advertise private cities as well as the dreams that motivate prospective homeowners to buy into the private enclaved city type of property and lifestyle (Ablo Reference Ablo2023).
Paradoxically, the ‘modernist’ and ‘seductive’ rhetoric that informs the imaginaries of enclaved private cities as a solution to ‘failed urbanism’ echoes previous colonial and post-independence urban development approaches (Côté-Roy and Moser Reference Côté-Roy and Moser2019). In Ghana, a case in point is the state-led development of Tema as a modern industrial, commercial and residential hub, which was planned in the 1950s and constructed in the 1960s. Private developers today interpret the case of Tema as a success story, an example of orderly or ‘controlled’ development that once took place in Ghana, which has crumbled due to the inability of the city government and public institutions to deal with informality and poverty (Ablo Reference Ablo2023). They base their imaginaries of the future of an enclaved private city development on the ‘past imaginaries’ of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ that similarly informed previous state-led projects, coupled with more current ‘Africa rising’ economic growth discourses (Côté-Roy and Moser Reference Côté-Roy and Moser2019; Bearak et al. Reference Bearak, Moriarty and Ledur2021). However, as demonstrated in an emerging body of literature to which our study also contributes, the hope that the ‘new cities’ can be detached from the ‘disorder’ and ‘chaos’ of the existing cities is remote (Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022; Fält Reference Fält2019; Herbert and Murray Reference Herbert and Murray2015; Murray Reference Murray2015; Reference Murray, Datta and Shaban2016; Sumich Reference Sumich2023; Watson Reference Watson2014).
This article explores the motivations that manifest detachment and placemaking efforts through various forms of attachment captured by the lived experiences of new residents in the Appolonia City of Light (ACL), a private city development project on the outskirts of Accra. Rendeavour, one of Africa’s largest developers, is behind the project. The ACL project covers 2,325 acres of land and is planned to house 88,000 residents in various housing enclaves in the future. Rendeavour uses an ‘enclave imaginary’ of spatial detachment, security and control to attract homebuyers and investors to the ACL. Housing in the ‘master-planned new city’ is marketed under a placemaking ideology of ‘Live, work, play’, offering tenure, investment and personal security in an area planned according to a ‘development control’ philosophy. By focusing on the various forms of socio-spatial attachments, we shed light on residents’ placemaking experiences and practices and their attempts to make meaningful lives when they establish themselves as ACL residents, which also implies a reconfiguration of their class position.
Based on data produced through interviews, observations and reviews of existing documents, this article shows that the aspiration to live in an enclaved private city is driven by complex relations, processes and imagined futures. For residents, moving into the enclaved city represents an aspiration to upward mobility and ‘modern’ life, often depicted as detachment from Accra’s congested, noisy, and infrastructurally and administratively cumbersome housing conditions. Despite this aspiration, residents living inside the enclaved city remained materially, economically and socially attached to the ‘outside’ at scales ranging from the family and the city to the globalized labour, housing and finance markets. This unavoidable contextual embeddedness redefines the imaginary of the enclaved city. As the residents are unequally endowed with resources, their attachments (or lack of attachments) have highly differentiated outcomes, affecting their possibilities for upward social mobility through private city life. Furthermore, the disjunction between the imaginary of the private city, which cannot – neither economically nor in terms of material practicalities – be realized through ‘development control’ detached from its infrastructural and institutional context, creates the need for reorientation towards spatially more inclusive and contextually embedded forms of urbanization.
In the next section, we draw on the concept of socio-spatial relations to frame attachment and detachment in the context of private cities. The third section presents the study area and methods, followed by an overview of residents, funds and their relations in the subsequent section. The motivations and aspirations of people moving into the private city and the lived experiences of residents are discussed in the fifth and sixth sections, with a focus on attachment and detachment, followed by a conclusion to the article.
Socio-spatial relations: understanding attachment and detachment
The increasing numbers of private cities across Africa (Ablo Reference Ablo2023; Côté-Roy and Moser Reference Côté-Roy and Moser2019; Murray Reference Murray2015; Reference Murray2017; van Noorloos and Kloosterboer Reference van Noorloos and Kloosterboer2018; Watson Reference Watson2014) are framed as enclave developments (Nielsen et al. Reference Nielsen, Sumich and Bertelsen2021) aimed at creating utopian urban spaces detached from the unplanned nature of existing African cities. Strikingly, the ‘enclave imaginary’ that has become a primary feature of private city projects echoes ideas of place as a secure bounded community under threat to be secured against the outside world (Harvey Reference Harvey1996). This type of framing has been criticized for leading to exclusivist claims to places, enclosing and endowing them with fixed identities, and claiming them for one’s own (Massey Reference Massey1994).
In urban Africa, critical infrastructure challenges and dysfunctional governance have led to an increase in private sector-led urban development projects. These private cities create ‘enclaved spaces’ marketed as detached havens of tranquillity and peace. Proponents of private cities seek to provide ‘bounded spaces’ within which people can be detached from the so-called urban chaos; however, these enclaves are materially and socially attached to the cities in many different ways (Côté-Roy and Moser Reference Côté-Roy and Moser2019). Thus, the particularity of any place is constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through a counter position to the ‘other’ that lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond’ (Massey Reference Massey1994).
A place constitutes a particular articulation of socio-spatial relations stretching out at all scales – the global as part of what constitutes the local, and the outside as part of the inside (Massey Reference Massey2005; Pierce Reference Pierce2022; Pierce et al. Reference Pierce, Martin and Murphy2011). Building on Massey’s understanding, current relational approaches to urban transformations call attention to ‘the insight that places, people and institutions are intricately shaped and constituted by relationships with “multiple elsewheres”’ (Grandin and Haarstad Reference Grandin and Haarstad2021: 294). Thus, while private cities are designed to be zones of exclusion and exclusivity and to provide an imagined ‘detached space’ for the urban middle to upper class, they are, as we will show, attached to local, national and transnational spaces, or ‘multiple elsewheres’, through capital flows, social relations and the negotiation of aesthetic values.
Enclaves – whether cities, regions, or any other place – are ‘perforated entities … [that] come with no automatic promise of territorial or systemic integrity’ (Amin cited in Pierce et al. Reference Pierce, Martin and Murphy2011: 58). Such a conceptualization of place resonates with the idea of enclaving as an aesthetics of separation and detachment, but where the inside inevitably always has a dynamic relationship or attachment to the outside. This is because enclaved private city projects are not simply physical structures but are products of ‘strategic place framing’ (Weller Reference Weller2019) – the discursive political process of place production (Martin Reference Martin2003; Pierce et al. Reference Pierce, Martin and Murphy2011). Essentially, although developers conceive private cities as detached spaces of exclusivity (Ablo Reference Ablo2023), those cities are embedded in and attached to complex processes (Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022) and relations that shape and are shaped by them. As highlighted, the institutional, economic, infrastructural and administrative features of the enclave’s surrounding city environment make it highly challenging for private city developers to realize their vision of strictly planned ‘development control’ – the strict enforcement of regulations on land use, the type and nature of housing, and certain forms of economic and social activities, as well as spatial development plans and standards.
Likewise, residents have images of what kind of place they buy into and, ideally, what life will be like there. However, the ideas, habits, resources and relations they bring with them from the outside continue to exist on the inside, and thus they remain attached to the outside, which influences their experiences of living within Appolonia City. The central question broached is: what insights do residents’ placemaking – their motivations for and experiences of living in the ACL – offer for analysing dominant discourses on enclaved private city development?
Exploring the enclaved private city
This article is based on fieldwork conducted among residents of the newly developed private city, Appolonia City of Light (ALC). Located on the outskirts of Accra, the ACL is one of several private cities developed by Rendeavour across Africa. Following the land acquisition in 2011, the development of the ACL commenced in 2014 on 2,325 acres (941 hectares) of land acquired from the rural community Appolonia, from which the ACL project has taken its name. With an initial investment of US$250 million, the ACL promises state-of-the-art infrastructure, including tarred roads, water, sewerage and a reliable power supply (see Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022 for a detailed discussion of the ACL project). As a master-planned mixed-use development (see Figure 1), the managers of the ACL promise development control, with a development committee in place, to ensure that people adhere to the ACL land use plan.
Appolonia City land use plan. Source: <https://www.appolonia.com.gh/project-details/plans/>.
Additionally, the ACL project promises access to problem-free land devoid of litigation, a significant problem facing Ghanaian cities (see Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022; Ehwi and Asafo Reference Ehwi and Asafo2021). As the entirety of the ACL project catchment area was registered by Rendeavour (Ablo Reference Ablo2023), investors are assured of the opportunity to develop their lands and not face any form of harassment or litigation. Residential enclaves were constructed as part of the ACL project. They include Oxford and Bijou (see Figures 2 and 3), which have been completed, and Nova Ridge, which is still under construction. The first phase of Oxford is a collaboration between Appolonia Development Company Limited, a subsidiary of Rendeavour, and Imperial Homes, a private real estate company in Ghana.
The Oxford. Source: Fieldwork 2018.
Bijou homes. Source: Fieldwork 2018.
Homes in Oxford are priced between US$85,000 and US$150,000. The Bijou Homes enclave is a more ‘affordable’ housing development with prices ranging from US$50,000 to US$75,000. Nova Ridge is a high-end enclave where investors buy land and design properties.
Data were collected through fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2022. Primarily, data were generated through in-depth interviews, informal interviews, observation, photography and online sources.Footnote 1 Ten ACL project officials were interviewed. They included the CEO, project managers, sales and marketing associates, and the facilities manager. The issues discussed were the ACL project overview, including its inspiration, design and planning, target market and challenges.
Categorized according to house ownership status, twenty-five ACL residents, who had lived there for between one and five years, were also interviewed. They comprised twelve homeowners, eight tenants, two caretakers, and three family dependants residing in the owner’s house. The interviews explored the aspiration to move to and live in the ACL and experiences of living there. Security guards, construction workers, gardeners and housekeeping staff were also interviewed to gain a broader perspective on living and working in an enclaved, private city.
The residents: people, funds and relations
The ACL project received considerable publicity in Ghanaian media. From giant billboards to radio, television and social media platforms, the concept of ‘Live, work, play’ became a buzzword concerning the ACL project. Politicians, media personalities and several other well-known Ghanaians have described the ACL project as a revolutionary initiative that will play a pivotal role in the urban landscape of Accra.
While the project take-off was slower than anticipated (Ablo Reference Ablo2023; Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022; Fält Reference Fält2019), the first phase of the residential development, the Oxford, had the highest number of residents, with about nineteen out of the forty-five units sold being occupied by 2020. The high-end Nova Ridge had some residents, while in the lower-priced Bijou, around eighty of 111 units were sold by 2022, although only approximately twenty of these were occupied by 2022. Our data show a wide range of people living in the ACL. According to one manager, ‘We are interested in anyone who shares in our dream and can pay.’ We explore the various categories of residents – homeowners, tenants and dependants – to understand how their resources and aspirations originate from and relate to ‘multiple elsewheres’ (Grandin and Haarstad Reference Grandin and Haarstad2021; Levitt et al. Reference Levitt, Lucken and Barnett2011; Mbembé and Nuttall Reference Mbembé and Nuttall2004), which in various ways shape their positions and experiences. As we shall see, for many homeowners, investing in ACL property represented not only a desire for comfortable living but also a platform for fulfilling social obligations and pursuing plans and dreams for the future.
Homeowners tended, unsurprisingly, to be middle- and upper-middle-class Ghanaians, including businesspeople working independently or for foreign or Ghanaian companies, officials in state institutions and NGOs, and mining and offshore petroleum industry workers. Many houses were owned by Ghanaians abroad (in the USA, UK, Australia and China) who used these houses as holiday homes, rental businesses, or as ‘family houses’ to fulfil kin obligations in Ghana such as providing housing for relatives or hosting family gatherings. By profession, they included academics, pastors, maritime officers and international consultants, and many had returned to their home country (to plan for retirement). We also encountered a few non-Ghanaian homeowners, such as a European developer hoping to invest in the planned ACL business park. A Jamaican American worked online for an international company while exploring his West African ancestral heritage; the ACL project offered a quiet environment and an avenue to seek his roots and re-attachment to Africa.
Tenants often viewed living in the ACL as a stepping stone towards achieving future goals. For example, an African British couple frustrated by the experience of living and raising children in a Brexit-fraught UK sought a new future in Ghana, where they envisaged participating in what they described as the ‘new African renaissance’ and establishing their own business. Furthermore, a group of Turkish block manufacturers rented ACL housing because they had established small factories in the vicinity and benefited from the construction boom. Other categories of tenants included Nigerian students and US-based Ghanaians on holiday. These tenants were a miscellaneous assembly temporarily residing while completing a project but planning for business, careers or housing elsewhere, and they did not necessarily aspire to join the ranks of Accra’s urban elite. However, some tenants expressed aspirations of homeownership and to participate in the urban middle-class lifestyle they perceived to be embodied by developments such as the ACL. Among these were Ghanaian engineers working for companies with projects in the ACL that rented housing for them. These young professionals planned to purchase a house in Bijou. One interviewee said that he could obtain a ‘huge loan’ from his employer to purchase the one-bedroom house he was currently renting. He planned to marry his fiancée, live with her in Bijou, and pursue the urban middle-class dream of careers and nuclear family life.
Another category of residents is the ‘dependants of homeowners’, including various types of residents who live in someone’s house without paying rent. Some of them were extended family members, caretakers for ‘absentee’ homeowners, live-in nannies and girlfriends. The homeowner–resident relationships reflect common patterns of attachment through social relations and institutions in Ghana. Housing arrangements are not merely material configurations but are embedded in Ghanaian cultural values that structure reciprocity among relatives and spouses. These norms govern exchanges of goods and services and financial support, while also reproducing asymmetrical dependencies shaped by gender, age, sexuality, family hierarchy, patronage and economic status. An example of a reciprocal relationship was an elderly woman who lived in her widowed daughter’s house (financed using the late husband’s life insurance) and was a vital member of the household, assisting with childcare. Other residential arrangements are characterized by dependency, such as between homeowner/employer and nanny, or when homeowners use the house as a ‘hideaway’ for a ‘second wife’. In such cases, ‘free’ residence can be precarious and short-lived.
As we see from the varied ‘resident inventory’ described above, very few households resemble the nuclear families depicted on the ACL’s website (see Figure 4). Their highly differentiated positionalities reflect the socio-spatial relations of class, labour, kinship and gender that constitute the articulation of the ACL as a mix of interconnections stretching from the local to the global scale (Massey Reference Massey2005). Thus, while private city developments are framed as detached utopian urban developments, the reality is a complex web of attachments through internationally sourced income generation and home financing, diaspora networks and resources, and more locally anchored networks of care, work and love. The uniform façades of the ACL’s residential enclaves conceal the coexistence of lower-middle and upper-income groups and render invisible their multi-scalar attachments and sourcing of resources from ‘the outside’ through relations of informality and intimacy that constitute part of their ‘inside’ (Massey Reference Massey2005). This glossy and strategic place framing (Weller Reference Weller2019) of the ACL not only has implications for how the residents live and thereby define the enclaved space but also restrains their ability to deal with the infrastructural, material and economic constraints that emerge as fundamental challenges of the enclaved private city model.
Nuclear family life as imagined on the ACL website. Source: <https://www.appolonia.com.gh/>.
The imagined space: motivations and aspirations for moving into the ACL
In Ghana, the developers of the ACL project view its ‘boundedness’ as an ideal and aim to offer an exclusive place for their clients to live close to work and recreational areas. The desire is to ensure that people can unplug or be detached from the poor planning in Accra (Ablo Reference Ablo2023). These ideas of detachment are fundamental not only for developers but also for residents. Writing on suburbanization in Luanda, Buire (Reference Buire2014) shows how people redefine their neighbourhoods as condominiums to represent a sense of upward mobility. However, as Amin (Reference Amin2005) contends, high global interconnections and flows undermine any conception of space as closed or detached. The ACL project was an outcome of global capital flows. Rendeavour is an American company that operates across Africa. The US$250 million initial investment in developing the necessary basic infrastructure in the ACL is part of a complex web of global capital. Invariably, enclaves are products of global connections and flows, whether corporate capital circulates in global financial markets or private capital circulates in transnational family networks.
Diverse factors shape people’s imagination of space and thereby their projections for the future; these factors work to determine not just the motivation to move to the ACL but also the type of property developed or invested in. For residents, tenure security is the primary and most crucial basis for investing in the ACL. All Ghanaian residents in the ACL project alluded to losing land to conflict and litigation in other parts of Accra. A retired resident observed:
We bought land at [a gated community in Accra] but were tossed from place to place. In the third place they gave us, we walled the land, but we were disturbed by land guards, and eventually they gave us another land at Ningo Prampram. We were tossed from Dodowa to Katamanso and finally to Prampram. After all this stress, all we want is a quiet place without land guards.
Tenure insecurity has become a key feature of land ownership in Ghana (Asafo Reference Asafo2020; Denchie et al. Reference Denchie, Ablo and Overå2021; Ehwi and Asafo Reference Ehwi and Asafo2021). The land tenure system in Ghana is cumbersome and conflict-ridden (Brobbey Reference Brobbey, Akinola and Wissink2019; Kansanga et al. Reference Kansanga, Arku and Luginaah2019; Ubink Reference Ubink2008; Yekple et al. Reference Yekple, Overå and Ablo2026). These conflicts detach people from their lands, and the tenure security promised by the ACL then becomes a basis for new forms of attachment to a private city.
In Accra, land acquisition is frequently marked by litigation, disputes and the activities of land guards – often armed young men who enforce the interests of parties involved in land conflicts (Ehwi and Asafo Reference Ehwi and Asafo2021). These actors commonly rely on intimidation and, at times, physical violence, occasionally resulting in fatalities. Against this backdrop, the ACL project secured registration of the entire land area under development (Ablo and Bertelsen Reference Ablo and Bertelsen2022), offering residents property perceived to be free from contestation. Challenging ownership within the ACL is widely understood as confronting a well-resourced multinational developer capable of mobilizing state security agencies. As one early career engineer resident explained: ‘I bought some land at [a community outside Accra], but there is litigation, and even though I have not lost the land, it is not safe for me to develop the land and move my family there.’ Such accounts illustrate how land disputes in Accra can escalate to the point of threatening personal safety, making investment security a central basis of residents’ attachment to the ACL. This perception is reinforced by declining public confidence in the banking sector following Ghana’s financial crises and the government’s banking sector clean-up, which led to the collapse of several financial institutions. In this context, real estate is widely regarded as a comparatively secure store of value, further enhancing the appeal of property acquisition within the ACL, where secure tenure and personal safety are integral to its attractiveness.
The aspirations of upward mobility and modern living through detachment from the ‘uncontrolled’ city surrounding the enclave are inherent in the planning of the ACL project and reflect a broader class system emergent in African cities. As shown in an advertisement, the ACL claims ‘to mitigate the stifling urban congestions within Accra’s city centre’. The project’s aim of a self-sustaining city is designed to detach residents from Accra’s congestion, noise and polluted environment: ‘Make your home your escape from the world.’Footnote 2 Thus, the image of a city that provides housing, workspaces and recreation without the need to plunge oneself into the chaos of Accra is expected to drive people’s attachment to the ACL.
Consequently, project developers actively construct and market an image of an orderly, secure and calm environment centred on ‘modern’ design, which residents frequently interpret as a ‘Western’ lifestyle. The place is branded through street names inspired by British names, such as Barron and Oxford streets. A developer referred to ‘the European model’, aiming to attract the taste of the affluent consumer segment in Ghana and also to make clients who are accustomed to ‘life abroad’, as he put it, feel that in the ACL they can have a ‘home away from home’. The ACL is therefore simultaneously a detachment from one system and an attachment to elsewhere. One expression of this was the emphasis on hedges and low ‘smart walls’ instead of the tall, closed concrete walls with spikes on top that are generally common in residential areas in Ghana. The hedge design plays into the branded image that walls and security measures surrounding the entire housing enclave will make life on its ‘inside’ a haven with ‘European’ aesthetics, a refuge where individual house owners do not need the type of physical protection from crime that is required in the city ‘outside’. The developers argue that the use of hedges instead of walls also promotes a sense of community and attachment among residents.
Personal safety and security are also essential motivations for people who have moved to the ACL. Crime is a significant challenge for many cities worldwide, and, in Ghana, the situation is no different (Wrigley-Asante Reference Wrigley-Asante2016). The absence of formal development planning in many Accra neighbourhoods results in residential construction in emerging urban areas with limited public services, conditions that increase vulnerability to armed robbery and break-ins (Owusu et al. Reference Owusu, Owusu, Oteng-Ababio, Wrigley-Asante and Agyapong2016).
In the ACL, the presence of police and military personnel offers residents and workers a sense of security. Each residential enclave within the ACL catchment is partially walled (see Figure 5), some with electric fences, although many of these are currently non-functional. This provides an additional layer of security for residents. The ACL has private security to guard the main entrance and the entrances to all residential enclaves within the city. Indeed, in the early days of the ACL project, all visitors to the project site were registered at the gate and received an SMS alert about their entry and exit (Ablo Reference Ablo2023). This allowed the company to track people’s entry and exit from the project site and their duration of stay. Residents considered this to be critical to their security. As of 2022, the electronic system was not functional, but people’s names and vehicle numbers were written down at the main gate.
‘Smart walls’ and newly planted hedges. Source: Fieldwork 2019.
Quality infrastructure was a central motivation cited by informants for moving to the ACL. Indeed, poor planning in most neighbourhoods of Accra results in situations where residential areas lack roads, water and electricity. According to a manager of the ACL, ‘We have invested about US$250 million in providing critical infrastructure to our clients. We provide paved roads, underground drains, an electricity substation, and water.’ This makes the ACL attractive to residents, many of whom come from other parts of Accra where there is no drainage, roads are poor, and there is an erratic supply of electricity. Many are also not connected to or do not have a stable water supply from the Ghana Water Company. Thus, people rely on private water suppliers and sachet water for consumption (Ablo and Etale Reference Ablo and Etale2024; Stoler et al. Reference Stoler, Fink, Weeks, Otoo, Ampofo and Hill2012). By providing this infrastructure, the ACL eliminates some of the biggest challenges confronting residents of Accra, particularly those in low- and middle-income neighbourhoods. The marketing of the ACL project highlighting this promise of world-class infrastructure was very attractive, as one resident narrated: ‘I was listening to Bernard AvleFootnote 3 on the Citi breakfast show, and he talked about the Appolonia project and the fact that they provide all needed infrastructure. So, I discussed it with my husband, and we bought the property here.’
The promise of modern high-end housing is another aspect of the infrastructure that attracts residents. The first house displayed at the ACL was furnished with quality products. The doors were high-grade reinforced doors, and the bathroom and kitchen were furnished with high-standard products. With such quality promised throughout the various ‘sub-enclaves’ of the project, people were highly motivated to secure investments in the ACL. As discussed later, what people received was starkly different from what was promised. Primarily, the ACL project promised a solution to the issue of poor work by independent contractors in Accra’s housing sector. Due to the minimal enforcement of building codes in Ghana, many houses develop cracks, leaking roofs and significant defects due to poor construction.
‘Peace of mind’ is connected not only to quality infrastructure, personal safety and modern aesthetics but also to the location of the ACL project, 20 kilometres north of the city of Accra. For some, ‘peace’ literally comes in the form of being detached from the noise of Accra (see Figure 6). Due to poor or no planning, many neighbourhoods in Accra are mixed-use areas with residential, commercial and recreational activities co-located. This often results in land use conflicts, as residents struggle to assert their use rights. For instance, loudspeakers and crowds in churches, mosques and pubs in residential areas often disturb the peace of these places. Informants alluded to the secluded nature of the ACL project (see Figure 6); for some, this was a decisive factor in making their investment in the ACL, as one homeowner stated who hoped to recreate his childhood ‘compound living’. A residential enclave manager confirmed that the ACL offered clients a quiet space and argued that ‘we guarantee our client’s strict development control. In the residential areas, we will not permit commercial activities.’ The prospects of avoiding the visual and sonic disturbances of typical Ghanaian economic, social and cultural life are very attractive to many residents who simply want peace, upward mobility and not to be in an area that can become disorderly. This was reflected in residents’ use of terms such as modern, Western, secluded and sophisticated in their description of the ACL.
Isolated completed and uncompleted residential enclaves in the ACL project. Source: Fieldwork 2019.
Apart from the first-class residential areas of Accra, many neighbourhoods suffer from poor waste management. Drains are often choked with plastic waste, weeds are common, and the environment is generally unkempt. Therefore, the facilities management promised by the ACL is appreciated. According to a facility manager, ‘Unlike many real estates in Ghana, we will maintain all facilities in the residences. We charge all residents a service fee that covers the waste collection, trimming of hedges, mowing of lawns, and general maintenance of the public spaces.’ At least in the project’s early days, the ACL employed staff to provide all these services.
The lived place: experiences of and adaptations to living in an enclave city
The lived experiences of people in the ACL vary with the diversity of residents. However, the imagined space – laced with the ideologies of an urban utopia that offers both attachment and detachment – was starkly different from the lived place. Among the expectations of moving to the ACL, the peace of the residential area stemming from its detachment from the noise of Accra was the reality that aligned the most with people’s motivation to move in. All informants alluded to the quietness of the place, just as they expected before moving in. This is primarily because the ACL is located away from central Accra. According to a resident, ‘It’s been cool [living in the ACL]. I enjoy land security and quiet living.’ Overall, the physical detachment of the ACL creates a quiet that was appreciated by most residents. Still, as we shall see, for some residents, quietness also implied a sense of remoteness and inaccessibility that made the practicalities of living in the enclave challenging and sometimes intimidating.
Apart from one respondent in the Oxford enclave who said they were satisfied with the quality of the infrastructure, every other respondent had some complaints about the quality of work. While the first show house had high-quality buildings and furnishings, people eventually received low-quality homes. As a property owner recounted:
The building quality was very low. My neighbour’s ceiling collapsed after water leaked into the house. He lives outside Ghana, and I had to send him a video of the damage. As for the quality of the houses, I feel Appolonia [ACL project] has shortchanged us. The doors were low-grade, and many of the facilities installed in the rooms were of low quality.
Here we see a clear dissonance between the imagined space (high-end urban development) and the lived place (substandard housing).
The issue of substandard construction is evident in Oxford. The paint on most of the houses peeled off. Residents complained about it as a visual feature of low-quality work. In some places, roofs outside fell off, and many walls looked damp. During one of our field visits to the ACL for an interview, the key broke when the respondent was trying to open the door to let us into the house. For many, breakages such as those we witnessed are common occurrences. Most residents feel disappointed regarding the quality of their homes. For many respondents, the low quality of buildings and the overall standards of the houses in the ACL represent a disconnect between the imagined space and the lived reality.
According to a resident, after the first few weeks when ACL workers trimmed them, many hedges and lawns became overgrown. Respondents noted that the ACL failed to maintain greenery as promised and residents often privately procured gardeners’ services. In places where people were waiting for facility managers to provide maintenance as agreed in their contracts, lawns and hedges were overgrown. When complaints about anything wrong were made to the ACL management office, they often went unanswered.
In 2022, when we revisited a house built in 2018, we observed that the external walls, made from plywood and beautifully painted, had all fallen off. The surrounding areas had become overgrown, with cattle grazing close to some of the residences. Weeds and trees were growing rapidly and some places had become forested. This was a primary concern, as reptiles were frequently observed, particularly in hedges. Despite the ACL’s ‘European model’, many wanted to replace the hedges with tall walls. In addition to the desire for more privacy, the construction of concrete walls expressed a clear aspiration towards detachment within the enclave; however, this was not permitted according to the ACL design regulations.
Unsurprisingly, many residents were contemplating a lawsuit against the ACL for what could be described as broken promises, ranging from the delayed handover of properties to incomplete properties that had been paid for and a failure to maintain the environment. Thus, for many, the space they imagined and that formed the basis for their interest in the ACL was detached from the place that existed. The relationship between developers and residents has deteriorated over the years, as many residents who were previously optimistic about the place felt shortchanged and were growing increasingly frustrated. A resident observed: ‘We have a land [that] we are developing. Once that is ready, we either sell or rent this place out and leave.’ The ACL was no longer a desirable space for many people.
Up until then, the developers had focused on residential construction, and the commercial, industrial and recreational provisions required for the ACL to become a ‘self-sustaining city’ were non-existent. As one businessman put it: ‘In Appolonia City there is living, but no work and play yet.’ Therefore, people must commute to central Accra to work and procure other services. Thus, the residents feel detached from, but simultaneously attached to, Accra. Unfortunately, the ACL project places residents on significantly congested traffic routes in Accra. People must leave home as early as 4 a.m. to avoid early morning rush-hour traffic. Without a car, commuting, schooling, shopping and socializing in the private city are complicated. A resident lamented, ‘Because of where we are located, it is difficult to shop for household supplies. You must travel to Madina or Accra [CBD] for these items. These places are far, so you can only go a few times a month.’ Another resident shared a similar sentiment: ‘I go to the market once a week to buy in bulk. I walk to the roadside. Uber does not want to come here. They cancel the trip. And if they come, they charge heavily. It is perceived as a place where people swim in money.’ There is high car dependence for people to access services in Accra, and those without cars for whom the detachment of the ACL is problematic tend to be less affluent tenants, dependants and workers.
These less affluent residents, in some respects, feel ‘out of place’; for such people, the detachment of the ACL is a burden rather than a desirable way of living. One example of a household that struggles to fit into the ACL is that of a retired person living with his daughter and grandchildren in a house owned by his son, who works overseas. Typical of the Ghanaian diaspora, the property owner bought a place at the ACL for his father and sister to live in in response to the obligation to support kin and to remain attached to Ghana. However, even though it is easier for Ghanaians in the diaspora to invest in a ‘family house’ in Ghana through a private city project, such ‘exclusive’ enclaved city housing may not be the most appropriate solution for relatives who must get by in the context of Ghana’s economic reality. The ‘dependent father’ explained the following:
We need a lorry station here. It will be nice if people can be allowed to sell something here. For now, you must go all the way to Oyibi just to get simple things, and without a lorry station, it is a struggle to even go to Oyibi. My grandchildren are not attending school because I do not have a car and no schools are around. My daughter is home and not working as there is nothing here to do. She is a hairdresser, but they will not allow her to open a salon. When she enquired, the Appolonia [ACL] said she could only buy land in a commercial area or rent a shop when they built one.
The ACL’s location, design, structure and regulations make some residents feel socially and economically inferior to their affluent neighbours – and the detachment of the ACL is undesirable. Low-income families struggled to pay the facilities’ user fees, which they considered exploitation by the ACL, and living without a car made their commute challenging.
There was a school under construction, but the works had stalled and, at the time of our research, there were no schools within the ACL for residents’ children. Parents either had to rely on school buses or transport their children to school themselves, or, in the case noted above, end up not sending their children to school. Again, there was a class dimension in the choice of schooling, as the less affluent tended to send children to schools in the nearby Oyibi area, while the more affluent could afford private transport to high-end schools located more centrally in Accra. However, even for the latter group, the remoteness and infrastructural constraints associated with the ACL’s location were a significant inconvenience for children and their parents, who had to leave home by 4.30 a.m. to avoid heavy traffic.
Home-based enterprises are a widespread feature of neighbourhood economies in Ghana, where they often sustain household livelihoods. Within the ACL, some residents viewed such activities as essential to improving their living conditions. Yet project regulations prohibited visible forms of informal commerce. While a few women adapted by selling cakes through social media or producing groundnut paste from home, such strategies depended on access to digital platforms, capital and social networks. ACL officials maintained that they could not intervene in cases where no physical signposts or structures signalled commercial use. At the same time, management permitted certain income-generating practices aligned with middle-class professional norms – such as remote work from home offices, short-term property rentals via platforms such as Airbnb, and the informal hiring of gardeners for private residences. In contrast, small-scale retail activities such as operating kiosks, hair salons or food sales were prohibited, effectively narrowing livelihood options for residents with lower incomes, less formal education or limited capital. These differentiated permissions reveal how regulatory frameworks within the enclave selectively legitimize some forms of economic activity while marginalizing others, thereby reproducing class- and gender-based inequalities in access to income-generating opportunities.
Between attachment and detachment: rethinking enclave urbanism
The ACL project is part of the increasing trend of private cities in Africa (Ablo Reference Ablo2023; Murray Reference Murray2015; Reference Murray2017; Watson Reference Watson2014). These private cities are often designed as enclaves (Nielsen et al. Reference Nielsen, Sumich and Bertelsen2021; Sumich Reference Sumich2023) to provide ideal city living, an urban utopia, detached from the so-called African urban crises (Hove et al. Reference Hove, Ngwerume and Muchemwa2013). These urban enclaves, therefore, exemplify conceptions of place as bounded (Harvey Reference Harvey1996) and, in the context of this study, detached. Achieving the aspiration of living comfortably, detached from the ‘chaos’ of the congested city, is conditioned on the ability to channel attachments and resources flowing in and out of the enclave through a multi-scalar polymorphy of socio-spatial relations (Jessop et al. Reference Jessop, Brenner and Jones2008) from beyond and circulating within the enclave. Through such channelling of resources through its porous boundaries, the ACL enclave constitutes a particular articulation involving many forms of social, material and symbolic attachments. This observation resonates with Grandin and Haarstad (Reference Grandin and Haarstad2021), who build on Massey’s (Reference Massey1994; Reference Massey2005; Reference Massey2007) view that cities emerge from relations, dependencies and lines of engagement with the ‘multiple elsewheres’; this is shown in the ACL, where external financing by the ACL and the Ghanaian diaspora are critical aspects of the growth of a private city.
As Massey (Reference Massey1994) noted, a place articulates a mix of social relations stretching across multiple scales, from intimate interactions within households to international transactions that reshape land tenure. Drawing on this scalar–relational understanding of place, our findings suggest that the ACL project reflects a particular articulation of private enclave urbanism that is often associated with what residents perceive as a Westernized mode of living, manifested in residential design and aesthetics that signal affiliation with affluent urban groups. While this dynamic is evident in the ACL case, it should not be assumed to characterize all private enclave developments in Africa or elsewhere; rather, it points to tendencies that may arise under specific socio-economic, cultural and institutional conditions. In the ACL, the class profile of people, types of houses they buy, and how they are governed to interact in the private city are outcomes of attachment and detachment, capital flows and social relations, from the most intimate to national and transnational scales. As some tenants depend on family attachments outside Ghana, we see their placemaking as an outcome of transnational capital flows. Thus, placemaking in the ACL emerges from a mix of links and interconnections to that beyond it (Massey Reference Massey1994; Pierce et al. Reference Pierce, Martin and Murphy2011).
Our findings regarding the motivations and experiences of enclave residents provide insights that may inform the debate on private city development as a bottom-up approach to urbanization in African cities. The realities of the surrounding society make it challenging to implement private urban development as an alternative to public urban development. Problems (informality, nature encroachment, traffic congestion, poverty and inequality) – or what Andres et al. (Reference Andres, Bakare, Bryson, Khaemba, Melgaço and Mwaniki2021) call ‘temporary urbanisms’ that emerge in response to both public and private sector service delivery and formal planning failures – ‘seep in’, so to speak, through the enclave’s perforated boundaries. With Fontein and Smith (Reference Fontein and Smith2023: 6), we thus argue that the enclave cannot be ‘preconceived or known in advance but worked out in the flow of its becoming … things are inherently unstable: boundaries become fuzzy, and things are mutable and multiple’.
Therefore, a reorientation of the enclave imagery seems unavoidable, reflecting a ‘new imaginary’ for African cities, as they are in the process of becoming something new that is both part of and separate from Western modernity (Harrison Reference Harrison2006). This form of urbanization approach cannot but recognize the informal alternative or substitute placemaking or temporary urbanism (Andres et al. Reference Andres, Bakare, Bryson, Khaemba, Melgaço and Mwaniki2021). Reorienting the enclave imagery could open up African cities to housing development for broader categories of people. In the ACL, there are signs that such reorientations of the narrative and the discursive strategic use of enclaving imagery have already occurred through the development of Wala Park, a new residential area on the private city’s fringe. Building on their mixed experiences with the ‘enclaved’ city approach and responding to the demand in Accra’s housing market, the ACL now targets low- and middle-income groups, mainly offering titled land for individual house construction in Wala Park, with less infrastructure and fewer regulations relating to housing design and residents’ way of living. This development reflects the realization that, although the spatial imagery of the enclave continues to be used in ACL advertisements and other private cities’ strategic place framing (Weller Reference Weller2019), the long-term sustainability of investments requires adaptation to contextual conditions through a more inclusive approach to urban development.
Acknowledgements
The authors received support from the Norwegian Research Council-funded project ‘Enclaving: Patterns of global futures in three African cities’ (project no. 274943).
Austin Dziwornu Ablo is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Ghana, Legon. His research involves urban governance, natural resources and rural–urban linkages.
Ragnhild Overå is a professor of human geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Bergen. Her research involves gender, entrepreneurship, informality, urban development and natural resource governance.
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