How was regulation instrumentalized by the state in the making of colonial urban Accra as a zone of European power and authority, and what strategies were deployed by the locals to spatially push back and assert rights to the city? In this book, a coalescence of technocrats determined to ‘create a city of imaginaries in the midst of pre-existing urban settlement’ (p. 19) using lawfare came in conflict with poor Africans in their quest for access and opportunities. Through an incisive analysis of a barrage of previously unexplored colonial archival documents comprising petitions, correspondences and letters suffused with oral accounts, the author argues that British colonial technocrats: administrators, sanitary and public health officials, urban planners, architects and the Accra town council officials had a vision of developing a city where the native’s capacity and access were neglected and erased through regulations. Regulation became both a tool to delegitimize the rights of locals to the city and a source of conflict between the natives and technocrats.

To justify how regulation became the locus of irreconcilable tension and conflict, the book articulates its core intellectual arguments from five inter-related prisms: sanitation, public health, trade and economy, mobility and housing. In chapters 1 and 2, Hart notes that the Accra colonial urban development plan racialized local residents through the enactment of unjust sanitation and public health ordinance and regulations that pathologized the local Africans as diseased, filthy and dangerous elements which pose threats to the health of Europeans and public in the new colonial urban space. To overcome this challenge, stringent tax, sanitary and public health regulations were immediately implemented. This was followed by the confiscation of all native land through ordinance and its transfer to the colonial government for development. Other regulatory measures include the 1894 town council ordinance and subsequent sanitation and public health ordinances that were hurriedly and haphazardly enacted without regard for the socio-cultural norms of the locals. In colonial Accra, colonial courts, prisons, sanitary and public health inspectorates were established to support urban capture and set parameters for discipline/punishment of individuals who violated the new colonial urban codes. They were empowered to arrest, detain and prosecute locals who violated the new urban ordinances. But harping on the pretence of enforcing sanitation and public health regulations that were often poorly understood by illiterate Accra residents, these urban technocratic machines committed to urban waste management spatially violated the private spaces of the locals. As officials undertook routine inspections of people’s latrines, sewerage, sleeping rooms and compounds in the midst of inadequate infrastructure, a seed of urban conflict emerged through the site of regulation justified by imperial technocratic scientific disciplines such as urban planning, architecture and public health. From these disciplines, Hart argues, emerged the production of knowledge and urban policies that undermined equity and justice in colonial Accra and other colonies.

Chapter 3 examines the spatial placement of poor African traders in colonial urban Accra markets, detailing how they confronted the expatriates and mediated the state and its racial regulatory tactics which undermined African traders’ access, rights and opportunities in the new city. By framing the local entrepreneurs such as corn millers, distillers and petty traders as a ‘nuisance’ and using regulations to eliminate them from the city, the colonial technocrats in practice consolidated spatial segregation that openly denied and worked against the existence of African informal economy. Therefore, informalization and its post-colonial manifestation in contemporary urban Accra, the book shows, are rooted in its spatially unjust colonial worlding. Through a meticulous interpretation of a cache of petitions, letters, pro-poor newspaper editorials and violent protests, punchily directed to the colonial officials, Hart illuminates the unheard voices of Africans and agency in colonial state in Accra. In chapters 4 and 5, the author accounts for the role of drivers, town planners and architects in colonial Accra. It recounts how pirate lorry, tro-tro drivers devised subaltern tactics like honking to signal the presence of police to other fellow drivers and conveying passengers along unapproved routes in order to bypass authorities. Town planners and architects also became important actors in defining the boundaries of order in terms of what kind of building was acceptable within the modern city. This book expands our understanding of urban history of Accra by shifting the discourse from the built form of the city to technocratic politics and regulations. By the resituating of Africa agency and subaltern voices, readers are better placed to appreciate and understand how colonial urbanity was not just about the built form but also access and opportunities.