Tamale Territories Research

[A]FA Tamale Territories focuses on inner city ‘peripheries’ in the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region. As with many territories in Ghana, these spaces are contested politically, functionally, and environmentally, making them an important focus point not only for our investigative project but also with relevance to the city and its inhabitants. The rapid and sprawling growth of the metropolitan area of Tamale has led to the merging of the built environment with the coexistent tree savannah and agricultural landscapes. Tamale is one of the fastest-growing cities in West Africa and can be characterized by its horizontality and the presence of peripheral urban conditions embedded in the fabric of the city. In this sense, it can seem both vacant and dense. However, when looking at these open territories more carefully, one can find that the ‘vacant’ is in fact not at all vacant. Rather, this anthropocentric definition deserves questioning. Investigating Ghana’s third-largest urban center through an ecological, multi-species, non-anthropocentric lens allows for new ways of understanding urban ecologies and urban change in the predominantly agricultural setting of northern Ghana.

Five themes focus and guide the research for [A]FA Tamale Territories: ecologies, peripheries, territories, scales, and crises. Their entanglement with each other, the questions posed by the lab and onsite studies in Tamale lead to new definitions of these five terms that are continuously rewritten throughout the lab.