Planning and the Politics of Informal Urbanization

Over a billion people worldwide live in informal settlements (or “slums”), according to the United Nations. Informal urbanization persists partly because of informal politics. My dissertation examines the relationships between informal politics, urban planning, and informal urban growth. I focus on “clientelism,” which refers to the provision of benefits to the poor in exchange for political support.

Clientelism and other forms of informal politics have been studied by political scientists, sociologists, and others—but rarely by planners. I argue that planners need to understand how these political dynamics operate because, in many countries, urban residents often access urban land and services not through formal plans, policies, and programs but through these informal—but often quite well-established—political relationships. My dissertation answers two questions: (1) Are clientelism and informal urban growth related and, if so, how? (2) Does clientelism in informal settlements impact urban planning and, if so, how do planners respond?

Using statistical models to answer the first question, I find that informal political dynamics are linked with patterns of urban growth. Cities in more clientelistic countries are more likely to experience urban growth in the form of informal settlements that appear to have been spatially laid out in advance of settlement (“informal subdivisions”) but not more or less likely to experience unplanned, ad-hoc informal growth (“atomistic settlements”). This correlation most likely arises from the fact that, in order to settle a larger area of land in coordination and have the security to do some form of informal spatial planning, settlers need political backing. This correlation between informal politics and patterns of urban spatial growth shows that informal politics is relevant to the core concerns of urban planning.

I explore the second question through a qualitative case study of Ghana, based largely on interviews of planners in Greater Accra. Planning in Ghana is widely considered ineffective: urban spatial plans are largely ignored, and most urban growth is informal. Most peri-urban land is controlled by traditional authorities (local chiefs), who are supposed to hold the land in trust for their communities, but often treat it as personal property, informally subdivide it, and sell it, resulting in informal urban growth. Ghana’s politics can be described as “competitive clientelism” in which parties compete for votes less on the basis of universal, programmatic policies or even meaningful ideological differences, and more through narrowly targeted clientelism. This leads to political interference in planning decisions and pressures on planners to play along. My research finds that although there are technical capacity constraints, planning fails mainly due to political factors like these. Yet, my research also demonstrates that the strategies planners in these environments use to contend with these political pressures can be instructive, even if they are not always successful. I argue that what is working, for both planners and urban residents, in an otherwise dysfunctional system can be a better starting point for planning reform than importing supposed “best practices” from completely different contexts, and I suggest ways to build on these locally existing practices in Ghana and beyond.

Chandan Deuskar is a 2020 Doctoral Recipient in the Department of City and Regional Planning, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Penn Institute for Urban Research.

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