Fuelling the future with concrete, papers, discourse: competing claims in the making of an oil city, Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana

In analysing the resource environment in Takoradi, I focus in this PhD thesis on the transformative power of oil on processes of social configurations, meaning-making practices and the processes of value formation such as land conversions. Sekondi-Takoradi is an example of petrolic semiosis at work: oil is not only a metonym for modernity in the form of a modern city, but also for global and urban citizenship.

The city of Sekondi-Takoradi knows a vibrant history, coloured by the presence of colonial infrastructures such as the harbours in Sekondi and Takoradi and the Railways. After some decades of a dwindling economy the recent oil discovery in 2007 has refuelled the dynamics and atmosphere tremendously in Sekondi-Takoradi, transforming it into a vibrant oil city. As a secondary city and with its new found oil city identity, Sekondi-Takoradi is standing at the threshold of its adulthood, still grasping to combine its contrasting elements to graduate to the dreamed-of world class city. Sekondi-Takoradi finds itself at the brink of changing into a middle class city. The invisible presence of oil, and its inherent uncertainty, is imposing a new spatial and temporal logic on the city, it re-orders space—at times a contested practice—and re-orients the future gaze of planners and inhabitants.

In popular discourse the petrolic semiosis of ‘oil is wealth’ resonates. Oil is money and everybody wants a share of it. Expectations regarding the impact of the oil exploitation in Ghana are strongly intertwined with perceived employment opportunities, from the onset the concept of ‘local content’ played a central role in public debate. On the level of the city, oil is a metonym for a modern, highly planned city with a befitting infrastructure. Oil informs the ‘oil city vision’: imagining Takoradi as an ‘investment destination’ with shopping malls, ‘four-star’ hotels and a blossoming Central Business District. Oil is impacting land with changing land values and land conversions as part of the scale-making project of lifting Sekondi-Takoradi to a global, modern oil city, a West-African trade hub. The envisioned African urban modernity present in the oil city vision is the result of a conflux of—locally and globally informed—rationalities, it is not only shaped by Western urban forms. In creating the vision of a modern, African, oil city, the city authorities apply tactics of place marketing, structuring of invisibility and a diversification of governing authorities.

Power is increasingly fragmented and contested in the oil- city. Sekondi-Takoradi is a highly desired city, where space, land, authority, and descent are contested (Robinson, 2006). Yet, Takoradi also offers spaces of growth, dreams and imagination through its new-found identity as the oil city. The friction (Tsing, 2005), or perhaps growing pains, that Sekondi-Takoradi is going through is a result of the city’s sudden graduation into a frontier city in the oil and gas industry.

Speculative practices in the form of real estate projects for ‘projected’ growth restructures power in the city, and a host of new players have entered the urban management scene in Sekondi-Takoradi. The volatile, speculative nature of the investments results in a new architecture of urban governance with a variety of governing institutions. As city councils no longer receive (enough) budget allocations from the central government, they look for funding in Public Private Partnerships, sales of land, property taxation and collaborations with NGOs. The future is (re-)imagined by authorities in the city: the Municipal Assembly brands the city as an oil-city in order to attract the necessary investors, investors bank on the image of the yet-to-come in speculative infrastructure development projects, while neotraditional authorities such as chiefs rewrite the past to exercise and claim authority.

The presence of oil also has a temporal quality, as futures are re-imagined or the past is rewritten in attempts to claim the present and the future. A focus on the temporal quality of oil (Ferry & Limbert, 2008) sought to discuss the production of possible futures. Both the King City project and oil are invisible in Takoradi’s cityscape, yet they have an affective quality, inspiring a multitude of future potentialities. I discussed the reverberations of oil on the imaginaries of the city, and how they are contested or responded to. The vision of urban planners materializes in relocations, demolitions and the upgrading of infrastructure, creating new areas of inclusion and exclusion (Pieterse, 2009). The planners’ vision of an oil city competes with other future potentialities and other urbanisms at work in the cityscape. The city’s authority is contested through protest marches, petitions, claims on land, and appropriations of space with street hawking and illegal extensions. In other cases urban villages and traditional authorities contest the STMA’s authority through the rejection of street naming exercises, favouring self-development, or by acting as urban planners in governing and altering public space themselves.

As the future is brought into the present with spectral and spectacular visions of urban development, the past equally plays an important role in the city. There is a transformation of traditional authority in the urban context, where the chief is reinforcing customary rule through court cases and through demanding a share of all land sales in the city. Secondly, the past is brought into the present—and thereby the future—through the cataloguing of history and the role historical documents play in rekindled chieftaincy and land disputes. A claim of ‘belonging to the land’ is materialized and produced in the form of paper. New bureaucratic forms of claims on descent range from home-grown histories, to adapted and self-drawn maps. Documents and the past become resources in order to lay claims on the present, and therefore also on the future. In the aspiring oil city of Takoradi the future is imagined and contested through concrete, paper and discourses.