Town Planning, Housing, and the Politics of Sanitation and Public Health in the Gold Coast (Colonial Ghana), c. 1880 – 1950

Abstract

Abstract Colonial officials remarked disparagingly about the nature of houses and what they presented as congested layouts in Gold Coast communities. Subsequently, drawing on nineteenth-century epidemiological theory that connected diseases and poor health to defective housing and congested settlements, the colonial administration introduced measures to redesign and reorder Gold Coast communities. This article examines the connection between colonial town planning and housing measures and the politics of sanitation and public health in the Gold Coast. It argues that the colonial state’s imposition of imported British town planning measures, building techniques, and housing styles in the Gold Coast and their aspiration to compel Gold Coast people to build and pattern their communities along so-called sanitary lines could not be fully realised. Thus, the extent to which colonial town planning and the accompanying transformations in African building styles improved sanitation and consequently, public health, is difficult to determine. Nonetheless, this study reveals that the local population’s holistic approaches to spatial designing and planning of their communities and their building styles were somewhat altered by the colonial imposition of eurocentric town planning policies and building styles.