Africa’s new urban spaces: deindustrialisation, infrastructure-led development and real estate frontiers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many African governments have embraced centralised spatial planning and the construction of large-scale connective infrastructure as a means to synergise industrialisation and functional urban development. This article examines the tensions between these economic and urban development objectives in Ghana and Kenya. Infrastructure-led development in both cases has fuelled extended and unplanned urbanisation and the production of new frontiers for real estate investment. However, the evidence indicates that it has failed to contribute to processes of structural transformation. This argument advances debates about the tensions between supply chain and rentier capitalism and problematises the assumed relationship between infrastructure-led development and industrialisation.