Building the city of the future: visions and experiences of modernity in Ghana's Akosombo township

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Periodical article

Title:	Building the city of the future: visions and experiences of modernity in Ghana's Akosombo township
Author:	Miescher, Stephan F.
Year:	2012
Periodical:	The Journal of African History (ISSN 0021-8537)
Volume:	53
Issue:	3
Pages:	367-390
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Ghana
Subjects:	modernization urban planning protest informal settlements 1960-1969
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853712000679
Abstract:	Akosombo Township, designed in 1960 by the Greek urbanist Constantinos Doxiadis, is the model city at the foot of the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam, Ghana's largest development project. The article explores different visions of high modernist planning for Akosombo and juxtaposes it with the desires for and imaginations of modernity among its residents. Officials of the Volta River Authority, the agency in charge of the township, promoted specific ideas about housing, husbandry, and hygiene, while residents engaged with and resisted this kind of social engineering. These tensions came to the fore, when the squatters of the informal settlement of Combine struggled to remain in the township. In conversation with residents, VRA officials produced a form of 'high modernist local knowledge'. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]