Why has over a century of planning at Accra Harbour produced the same outcome—the systematic exclusion of urban fisher communities' experiential knowledge from planning processes? This paper traces the epistemological dimensions of planning at a single harbour site in Accra, Ghana, across three distinct moments: colonial harbour engineering (1906-1926), the post-independence plan for Accra (1957-1965), and the contemporary redevelopment of the harbour under ChinaAid's Belt & Road Initiative (2016-2026). 

Drawing on archival analysis of UK Parliamentary papers and (colonial and post-colonial) planning and legislative texts, ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2022, key informant interviews in 2025 and 2026, and satellite imagery documenting the harbour's transformation, the paper demonstrates that successive planning regimes reproduce knowledge hierarchies through which community expertise is rendered structurally invisible. The mechanism shifts—from racial-sanitary science to developmental modernisation to formalisation—but the epistemic effect remains constant. The paper argues that pressure points at the urban-ocean interface are not merely spatially produced but epistemically constituted, and that the problem is not merely the absence of community knowledge from planning, but its active devaluation through professional categories that constitute it as informal. Epistemic justice requires more than procedural inclusion. It demands the structural incorporation of community knowledge as data and expertise that shapes plans.

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Kimberly Noronha is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn IUR and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines how informal coastal communities in the Global South navigate state relationships and climate change, drawing on five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork with urban fisher communities in Ga-Mashie (Accra, Ghana) and Kochi (Kerala, India). Across this work, she has developed the frameworks of adaptive resistance, embedded exclusion, legitimised liminality, and the informal state to analyse how marginalised communities assert claims to urban space despite systematic exclusion from formal governance. Her dissertation is being revised as a book manuscript for the University of Pennsylvania Press, and her recent articles appear or under review at Urban Political Ecology (forthcoming), the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and the Journal of Planning Education and Research. 

In her current postdoctoral role, she conducts research for Task Force V of the SDSN Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance, supervised by Paul Smoke (Professor of Public Finance and Planning, NYU Wagner; Task Force V Chair) and Eugénie L. Birch (Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research, Weitzman School of Design; Co-Director, Penn IUR), examining how subnational capacity assessment frameworks shape access to climate finance.

Kimberly holds a PhD and AM in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania (2025), an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Delhi, an MSc in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London, and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from St Xavier's College, Mumbai. Her dissertation supervisors were Eugénie L. Birch (Chair), Lisa Mitchell, and Francesca Ammon. Before her doctoral work, she spent over 15 years in development practice, including managing DFID's £14.5 million urban poverty reduction programme in India and providing research and advisory services to the World Bank, UNDP, and the Centre for Policy Research.