Gendered implication of neoliberal urban redevelopment in global south cities

In global south cities, rampant urbanisation has caused a persistent increase in informality. Scholars have discussed informality as a peculiar feature to global south cities with a multifaced nature rendering it difficult to define and impossible to suppress. The World Bank reports that the informal economy provides employment to over 80 percent of urban dwellers in global south cities. In sub–Saharan Africa, 92 percent informal workers are women which makes the discussion of informality, a discussion of women, their work, and livelihoods. The World bank, International Labour Organisation, and the United Nations leaning on the conception of informality by Hernandez De Soto (1989) as a hub of ‘untapped reservoir of wealth’ postulate that global south cities have more to gain from the urban economy if the informal sector is well organised, regulated, and governed by a central government through diverse neoliberal policy recommendations. These neoliberal policy recommendations towards urban transformation include the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and International Labour Organisation’s Recommendation 204. However, scholarly work suggests that the adoption and implementation of these policy recommendations result in the eviction, displacement, and relocation of informal workers across sub-Saharan African cities. Consequently, the contemporary infrastructure (re)development in African cities has rather become a “catalysts for and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political-economic space at multiple geographical scales”. In this paper, the goal is to explore and analyse the gendered implication of public space use and governance for sustainability. To attain this objective, I use the redevelopment of a public space in a major Ghanaian city of Kumasi as a case study by asking the question; how does redevelopment affect the livelihood of women working in public spaces? I rely on a new institutionalist approach basing on the premise that institutions and actors influence each other and build on this approach with a political ecology lens to explore access and property rights with an emphasis on the gendered nature of resource governance in cities. To achieve the objective of this study, I define public spaces as common pool resources as well as common goods because they are prevalent, challenging to regulate and competitive in use. I also define informality as just a way of doing things in global south different from other spatial contexts.