FACES OF KOTOKURABA MARKET // Human stories behind urban infrastructural change in Cape Coast, Ghana

I had the incredible privilege of photographing alongside my old Urban Studies grad-school pal Arianna King this past January. With her words and research, and my portrait and environmental images, we created collaborative work honoring the real human stories behind urban infrastructural change.

Here are Ari’s words contextualizing her research at the market:

The Kotokuraba Market, the central public market in the city of Cape Coast, Ghana, has recently undergone a drastic physical transformation from a traditional open-air market to a more Western-style shopping mall. Although, many scholars and urban technocrats argue that the modernization of Africa’s urban marketplaces represents a positive change, few consider the detrimental social impacts that affect the lives and livelihoods of community members. From lost wages, to on-going administrative battles for space within the new market, in the case of the Kotokuraba members of the market community consistently express their resentment for the politicians and planners that so casually excluded them from the critical planning and redevelopment processes.

In a discussing the feelings and experiences of exclusion with vendors, I began to gather suggestions on how best to approach this lost sense of agency and ownership of the new market space. One of the ideas that emerged was to find a way to publicly highlight the way people are taking ownership of the market space to suit their needs, a process that no planner or engineer bothered to engage in.

*Please note vendors went by—and were known—by many different names. For this web display of the project we have not included names.