Place-Making, Regulatory Politics, and the Roots of Informality in Colonial Accra
Jennifer Hart (Wayne State U)
Abstract
Administered by a partially-elected Town Council as early as 1894, Accra was simultaneously a colonial showpiece and a grand experiment in decentralized urban governance. Their efforts at large-scale spatial, social, and economic transformation hampered by the will of the town, members of the Town Council and other colonial offices mobilized the power of regulation and categorization to marginalize and criminalize long-standing practices among African urban residents. This unfolding set of regulations covered a wide range of issues, from the designation of public lands to relatively intimate domestic issues like how to store water or grind corn. Justified through the language of sanitation and health, regulatory politics did not eliminate local practices; however, regulations did effectively informalize them, creating new legal structures that defined the parameters of urban life in new ways.
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About the Speaker
Jennifer Hart is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University, where she teaches courses in African History, World History, Digital History, History Communication, and historical methodologies. Every other summer, Jennifer leads a study abroad program to Ghana, West Africa, where students engage in research with community members in the capital city, Accra. She also serves on the advisory boards for the Master’s in Public History program, the Global Studies program, and she coordinates the Digital History/History Communication initiative in the History Department, advises students in the Digital History track for the MAPH, and coordinates the interdisciplinary Digital Humanities minor. She is currently the co-chair of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Steering Committee through the Office of the Provost, and she is the North American President for the International Society for the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning in History.