Beyond the binary: Hybrid urbanism and the limits of the (in)formal in Accra

Abstract

Contemporary cities in the Global South operate through regulatory complexities that exceed the binary distinction between formal and informal urbanism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Accra, Ghana, including narrative interviews and spatial observation, this analysis engages the concept of hybrid urbanism to illuminate how self-built housing and unregulated livelihoods are produced, organized, and governed through overlapping systems of authority, accountability, and spatial regulation. While existing scholarship successfully challenges the formal/informal binary, it has largely treated hybrid urbanism as a static condition rather than a dynamic process. This article addresses that gap by theorizing the temporality of hybrid urbanism: how it emerges through graduated integration and how it can be destroyed through planning without integration. Both in inner-city markets and within self-built settlements on the urban fringe, actors such as tenant coordinators, market women’s associations, and unelected informal leaders mediate disputes, enforce land-use norms, and regulate access to space, services, and income-generating opportunities. These practices sometimes involve consultations with and acknowledgments from municipal officials, thereby blurring the lines between legality and illegality, between planned and unplanned, and between formal and informal, revealing a regulatory multiplicity embedded in everyday urban life. The comparison between Old Fadama (where hybrid governance emerged organically over decades) and Adjen Kotoku (where relocated residents must rapidly reconstruct governance systems after state-imposed displacement) reveals what is at stake when planning interventions fail to recognize existing regulatory arrangements. This analysis introduces the concept of social infrastructural acknowledgment as a framework for planning practices that build upon, rather than destroy, existing hybrid governance systems. By theorizing hybrid urbanism from the ground up, this article contributes to an ongoing effort to reframe how cities are understood, built, and governed in a time of widening inequality, infrastructural fragmentation, and state withdrawal.