On (Un)formalisation: The Regulation of Architecture in Ghana
SAH 2023 Annual International Conference Montréal | April 12–16
The paper presented is the first from my new project on The (Un)formalisation of Architecture in West Africa.
Much of the built environment in Africa falls under what is typically characterised as ‘informal’ because many people on the continent build outside of formal planning regulations and without the services of an architect or state-sanctioned professionals. These types of construction sometimes manifest as ‘shacks’ but also include expensively constructed homes, capital-intensive multi-storey buildings and extensive industrial facilities. Yet studies of architecture on the continent tend to disproportionately focus on formal sectors or study the ‘informal’ as poor, illegal, or aberrant.
In this paper, I discuss the formalisation, regulation and bureaucratic control of architecture and the people who build in the Gold Coast and Ghana through a concept that I term unformalisation. By unformalisation, I refer to the diminishing and othering of knowledge, activities, and objects by states and other organisations of authority. It differs from informality and the informal, which are generally conceptualised as residual categories of formalisation and formality, in that unformalisation is a deliberate technology of state, elite, and institutional exclusion. I posit that just as the formalisation and regulation of the built environment – a process initiated by colonial authorities and continued by post-independence governments – is a process of state and institutional power, so is unformalisation.
Based on a collection of over 30,000 endangered archival documents from early- and mid-twentieth century Ghana that I have recently digitised, I analyse the colonial and postcolonial development of urban governance, building regulation, and the architecture profession. I show how authorities used formalisation and regulation processes to diminish and exclude indigenous builders and built forms and explore the contemporary legacies of this in African cities. I also consider how, because of these processes, the creation of architecture in much of the country was cut off from its communal roots and transformed into the individualized venture we see dominate today.