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Transport workers have largely been placed outside the radar of critical urban studies, although they are at the core of urban mobility. By adopting a co-production perspective and asking 'who owns the motor tricycle taxis in Wa, Ghana', this paper explores owner-operator relationships in the tricycle taxi industry. We posit that rather than being actuated by workers in the informal economy, the industry is co-produced by practices of state-sanctioned institutions, street-level bureaucrats and actors linked to power and wealth. The varied actor constellations and resultant contractual arrangements greatly shape how motor tricycle taxis operate; their mobility offers and regulatory challenges in Ghana. Therefore, we propose an urban research agenda that mainstreams urban transport workers into critical urban studies and call for an open discourse to interrogate the problematisation of motor tricycle taxis in urban transport policy and planning in sub-Saharan African cities. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ghana is experiencing high population growth, rapid urbanization and a constantly accelerating growth of urban areas. Yet, the accurate delineation of urban settlements remains a major challenge faced by urban planners. While the emergent urban settlements are being characterized by highly-diverse, heterogeneous, and multiplicity of features, the need to rethink how best to classify new urban growth areas, beyond the commonly used population threshold of = 5000 inhabitants, is becoming increasingly inadequate. Thus, this paper proposes a multi-criteria approach, drawing on the concept of 'hyper-diversity'. Eight key dimensions - urban form, built-up extent, socio-economic functions, land-use dynamics, occupational structure, and governance structure and population size - were identified as a guide to the delineation of new urban settlements. Inferring these dimensions requires accurate spatial and statistical data on the prevailing land-use dynamics. Thus, the paper argues that analysing satellite-based remote sensing and ground truth-gathered data may provide standardized and timely information on the aforementioned dimensions. Applying this multi-dimensional approach may be useful for Ghana and similar countries where there is a lack of regular mapping of urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public parks are important to urban environments, residents, and visitors. Among other functions, they provide environmental services, such as air and water purification, and they increase both recreational opportunities and the attractiveness of the urban environment. Because of their importance, urban parks serve as public spaces that provide visitors and urban residents with rights to the city. This paper identifies the dearth of urban public parks in Accra-Tema city-region as worrying. TheAccra Plan 1958underscored the significance of green spaces and designated the coastal strip for parks development but the areas have been lost to various urban uses. We argue that the continual neglect of public parks within urban planning and community development schemes in the Accra-Tema city-region is a major concern because it is depriving the citizens a right to the city and its public spaces. A number of factors have worked adversely against the provision of public parks and green spaces in the city-region. These include development pressures, undue political interference, a complex land delivery system, and ad hoc planning. The paper concludes by offering policy suggestions as to how to resolve the dearth of parks and green spaces in the city-region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's rapidly urbanising world, young people from poor socio-economic backgrounds are becoming increasingly marginalised. Young men in particular are adapting to very mobile forms of existence. Navigating complex and unfamiliar urban landscapes, they must constantly interpret and adapt to changing circumstances in order to survive. Living in shifting informal urban environments, they have of necessity developed survival strategies and new behaviours, drawing on traditional beliefs combined with new urban experiential knowledge. However, while women and children are generally considered most vulnerable to the growing levels of risk associated with everyday life in densely-settled informal urban settlements, the particular vulnerabilities of the itinerant young men who live there have generally been disregarded or at best are poorly understood. This presents a critical gap in our understanding of urban risk in South Africa. Answering to a research imperative that seeks to understand the nature of the mobility of young black South African men living in informal settlements, and the vulnerabilities associated with their fluid and generally insecure livelihoods, this paper contributes a new perspective to current understandings of urban risk, presenting a review of key bodies of literature and relevant theoretical debates drawn from disparate disciplinary perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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