‘We are at the mercy of the floods!’ : Extreme weather events, disrupted mobilities, and everyday navigation in urban Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines how extreme weather events affect the mobility of low‐income urban residents in Ghana. Bringing together scholarship on extreme weather and mobilities, it explores the differential impact of flooding on their everyday lives as they navigate the cities of Accra and Tamale. A range of qualitative methods were drawn on, including semi‐structured interviews, focus group discussions, and follow‐along‐participant observations in selected communities of both cities. Three key themes emerged: disrupted road and transport infrastructure, everyday mobility challenges, and coping/adaptive strategies. In flooding conditions, residents experienced difficulties leaving/returning home, engaging in income‐generating activities, and accessing transport services and other key urban infrastructure. Conceptually, the paper reveals how disruption to urban residents’ daily movements and activities (re)produces new forms of mobilities and immobilities, which have three relational elements: postponed, improvised and assisted. Throughout the analysis, we show how these mobilities/immobilities vary by age and gender: all urban residents, (though women in particular), experience postponed mobility; young people especially engage in improvised mobility; and children and the elderly are in greatest need of assisted mobility. The paper thus contributes to scholarship on extreme weather events and mobility by providing a more spatially nuanced understanding of the multi‐faceted domains in which flooding, socio‐economic conditions and adaptive strategies intersect to influence urban mobility in resource poor settings.