Green Spaces, Gray Cities: Confronting Institutional Barriers to Urban Reform

Tuesday, February 25th, 2020 Spencer NederhoodFebruary 25th, 2020 • Bookmarks: 691

Kumasi, Ghana - August 21st, 2012: The centre of Kumasi is the main market place in West Africa. People, traders and customers meet each other at this crowded place.

In many of the world’s largest urban areas, the basic standards of living set out in the Sustainable Development Goals are woefully out of reach. In the developing world, cities won’t achieve those goals without providing adequate green space. Conceived broadly, green space is anything ranging from parks or clean waterways, to orderly developments that provide adequate housing without sacrificing the public space necessary for civic life.

In the second half of the 20th century, policymakers in rapidly developing cities often had plans to implement such designs. Unfortunately, these plans failed under the pressure of external circumstances or institutional failures. In a recently published study, two researchers examine these challenges to understand how the fastest developing metros came to this impasse, and how to develop an initial strategic framework to chart a new path.

In their paper, “Institutional Barriers to Urban Greenspace Planning in the Kumasi Metropolis of Ghana,” co-authors Stephen Kofi Diko and Danilo Palazzo from the University of Cincinnati focus on a case study of Ghana’s second largest city, Kumasi. This one-time “Garden City of West Africa” conceived of a series of mid-century plans for urban green space, which it then largely failed to carry out under the pressure of Kumasi’s rapid physical expansion: the city’s built-up area grew 4.5 percent per year between 1986 and 2014.

To identify the themes and patterns that might explain the failure to implement green space, Diko and Palazzo gather data from a series of five urban development plans and from interviews conducted with urban planning professionals in 2015 and 2018. They divide the institutional constraints they find into two categories: internal barriers that arose within planning departments and external barriers that originated outside of them.

Internally, the authors find three critical issues: lack of coherent vision, capacity challenges, and political interference. Planning departments encountered problems with vision because foreign consultants, not local experts, frequently carried out the actual planning. Without in-depth knowledge of local idiosyncrasies, they designed plans that communities never fully identified as their own. Consequently, these communities abandoned the plans before completion. Capacity challenges due to inadequate or sporadic funding left departments unable to act promptly on plans, opening the way for business and commercial interests to encroach on land allocated for public development. Even when illegal, these encroachments persisted because vote-sensitive politicians declined to prosecute violations. Finally, local departments were highly decentralized, with little coordination. Department heads frequently had conflicts of interest and protected their department’s jurisdiction at the expense of collaboration.

Externally, planners did not coordinate properly with the chiefs who directly controlled the land, allowing them to siphon off resources. Public misconceptions also impeded implementation, as supporters of urban green space did not contextualize them properly as an economic and social investment. Consequently, the public saw these spaces as wasteful. All the aforementioned factors, both internal and external, contributed to plans lacking teeth and scope.

Going forward, policymakers and planners who face rapid urbanization in developing economies require bolder and more cohesive strategies. The authors note that some municipalities, such as Singapore, have shown that these challenges are not insurmountable. Singaporean policymakers balanced urbanization and green space in part by treating the provision of the latter as an intentional, long-term process, not an ad hoc one. Additionally, they implemented simultaneous progressive reforms, backed by political and economic commitments, that contextualized urban green space as an opportunity for economic development and a tool to provide residents access to quality urban life.

The challenges of urbanization are not new, but with new scale comes new urgency. Due to the mistakes of the past century, today’s urban residents are paying burdensome costs in health, opportunity, and quality of life. For the current generation to break the cycle, policymakers must adapt. Going forward, Diko and Palazzo suggest further avenues for research such as a deeper analysis of the sociocultural factors that act as barriers to green space planning, including resident and landowner perceptions. In the meantime, the pressures from rapid urbanization will continue to grow.