Above: An intersection in Accra.
LGS set up local administrative institutions and assemblies in sub-metropolitan districts of cities. Administratively, Ghana is divided into regions. Those regions are sub-divided into districts (or metropolitan, municipal areas). Within those districts, there are further geographical divisions known as the sub-metros. Planning responsibilities were decentralized and the degrees to which planning schemes were created and carried out vary greatly within sub-metros. As development Ownership Type Description usually occurs faster than plans can be made or planning resources can be distributed, many State/ Public Land Acquired and administrated by government. Makes up about 22% of sub-metros do not resemble their local plans. In land in Ghana. addition, there is a strong connection between Vested Land Previously customary land but declared under the Land particular types of land ownership and the resultAdministration Act (Act 123) to be vested and administrated by the ing physical development. State for the 'benefit' of indigenous In the District Assemblies, a team of developcommunity. ment agents, representatives of the people, and Customary Land Stool/ Skin Land: Land is held in a stool and administrated by a other agencies were meant to create plans to paramount leader for the indigenous community. address local development issues (AMA Planning Family Land: Land administrated and Office, 2009). In practice, however, decentralizadistributed by Family head. tion has simply transferred the responsibility for Private Land Land is owned by an individual providing basic services and planning to local governments, “…in the absence of demonstrated Figure 1. Types of land tenure in Ghana. Sources: leadership capacity…and also without the transfer Paul Van Asperen & Jaap Zevenbergen 6; Katherine V Number of Number of Households/ GoughPopulation & Paul W Houses K Yankson 2488; A. Gambrah 23, 24. of necessary decision-making power and financial Geography Households House People/House partment (TCPD) in Accra its legislative mandate. A centralized planning system was carried on into independence when the government decided to de-concentrate planning decision-making in the hopes of speeding up planning decisions and allowing them to be made at the local level. To address the issues related to having a centralized planning system, a Local Government System was implemented in 1988. The
East Legon
7681
1340
1750
1.31
5.73
Jamestown
13617
691
3336
4.83
19.71
1,658,937
132,355
356,550
2.69
12.53
A.M.A
resources” (Beard, Miraftab, & Silver, 2008). A representative from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the organization that selects World Heritage Sites around the world, wrote, “...while the colonial powers had the administration and resources in place to manage, maintain and develop cities…a great deal of know-how and resources simply were not there to pursue the effort after independence and urban centres [such as Accra] started to decay” (Lefevre, 2002). Since the collapse of the First Republic, after independence in 1957, local government in Accra has been incapable of servicing and providing basic infrastructure, such as paved roads, to this expanding city. Several complementary infrastructure departments were created to try to fix these issues; for example, a department solely for urban roads was established. These departments were created to try to deal with infrastructure issues, but they too have not been successful and have led to the further fragmentation of planning duties. Ghana’s Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources launched a Land Administration Project in 1999 to fix the “…regulatory framework, [and] weak land administrative regime [of] both public and
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