Rebuilding Precarity: Dwellings & Demolitions in Jamestown Harbor, Accra, Ghana

Over the past five years, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has demolished regions of Jamestown harbor, an informal settlement in Ghana’s capital city of Accra, to make way for a new harbor backed by foreign investment. Hundreds of residents’ dwellings were destroyed, although many residents returned and built new dwellings. In Ghana, expanding infrastructure development engenders the continual dispossession of poor urban communities (Gillespie, 2016). Drawing on two months of ethnographic fieldwork using semi-structured interviews and a participatory drawing method, this research finds that residents of Jamestown harbor construct smaller and more unstable dwellings in response to their vulnerability. This thesis highlights how precarity emerges from the demolitions in Jamestown harbor and is reproduced as residents react to past demolitions by anticipating future demolitions. Understanding eviction-related precarity is of critical importance as rates of eviction among vulnerable populations in Ghana and across the globe continue to rise