Louis Kusi Frimpong

University of Environment and Sustainable Development · Department of Geography and Earth Science

Decades of political ambivalence, housing injustice, and a neoliberal housing sector aided by the government's lax approach to housing provision have meant that, private rental housing remains the predominant sector for housing urban residents and their shifting geographies into secondary cities. Residential satisfaction in urban areas provides an...

Prior disaster experiences often provide lessons for communities to respond to new disasters. In informal communities prone to disasters but conditioned within reactive disaster management regimes, residents and Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) play immense roles in disaster risk reduction and response. In Freetown, Sierra Leone, limited govern...

Coastal flooding and erosion, caused by climate change-induced sea level rise, pose significant threats to low-lying coastal areas worldwide. The African continent, including Ghana, has experienced severe impacts from these hazards, affecting the socio-economic development of coastal communities. This research focuses on the Keta municipality in Gh...

Framed within policy support for bottom-up community water management in development practice in the global south, this paper explores the institutional barriers that impede effective community management of water infrastructure in water-stressed rural communities in the Upper Manya District and Yilo Krobo Municipality in the Eastern region of Ghan...

The rapid transformation and modernization of African cities have resulted in the gradual but solid deployment and consumption of digital products for various purposes. While the integration of digital technologies and products in urban life is essential for tackling numerous socio-spatial and economic challenges of African urbanization, their end-...

Despite years of investment into the water sector in Ghana, access to and expenditure on potable water for drinking and domestic use remain a challenge for most urban households. Within the urban context, however, the severity of water challenges varies from one residential community to another, with less research attention often given to such intr...

The urban majority in Africa do a great deal of walking, yet we do not fully understand the lived realities of the so-called captive walkers, who have no option but to walk. This study explores the everyday lived accounts of urban residents as they navigate the walking environment in two low-income neighbourhoods in Accra, Ghana’s capital. The stud...

Higher educational institutions are most often expected to equip students with the needed skills to make an impact in their communities, while also contributing to sustainable development in their surrounding communities. Though efforts are being made to realize the above goal, there has been little academic attention given to how universities can...

Purpose: Integrating and advancing social sustainability is foundational to achieving the urban sustainable development goals. Given the rapid transformation of cities in the Mediterranean region, this study sought to assess residents' evaluation of social sustainability in two socio-spatially diverse neighbourhoods of metropolitan Istanbul. Desig...

Spatial informal urbanism practices towards value retention and circularity have received little attention in extant literature. Yet, informal settlements in African cities have played out as built spaces for necessity-driven value retention of materials, goods, and services, which potentiate the circularity of waste resources. This chapter highlig...

Globally, national and city governments in developing regions are making frantic efforts to regulate and manage electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) to protect the environment and reduce its attendant environmental effects on the urban populace. Because of the above, some countries have formulated several policies and legislations aimed at tac...

Small and Medium-sized Cities (SMCs) are becoming the new frontiers of global urban population growth. The newly developed degree of urbanization projection suggests a gradual transition from rapid growth in the last half-century to slow growth by 2050, especially in large cities of middle and low-income countries (UN Habitat, 2022; UN DESA, 2018)....

Disaster risks in African cities are compounding due to the triple convergence of climate change impacts, unplanned urbanisation, and entrenched socio-spatial inequities. Disaster events are, therefore, common with disproportionate impacts on informal residents yet resting within reactive and extremely limited disaster management regime that leaves...

Open-surfaced water sources have been used to irrigate vegetable farms in cities. Open-surface water often contains unmonitored concentrations of health-threatening contaminants that pose health risks, especially when used to produce vegetables for human consumption. However, information on levels of heavy metals and feacal coliforms in such vegeta...

In sub-Saharan African cities, community-driven development has emerged as a collective response to entrenched socio-spatial inequalities and inappropriate local development planning responses to the challenges of informal settlements. Social capital is considered to stimulate such community-driven initiatives. There are also claims that social cap...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a debilitating socio-economic impact on livelihoods across the world. Extant studies show that livelihood capitals in developing countries have been hard hit due to their vulnerability and the minimal support system available to help people respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the extent of the pandemic’s impact on...

This paper confronts the current policy landscape and lived experiences of walking in African cities through the lens of policies, plans, institutional, and residents’ narratives. The paper builds on qualitative evidence drawn from content analysis and semi-structured interviews with local-level stakeholders across policy sectors concerned directly...

Informal settlements are projected to host future increases in Africa’s urban population growth. This has led to calls within African urban scholarship and practice for a capable and enabled urban planning response that promotes inclusive and sustainable principles in urban planning and management. Tracing the scholarship on Angola, this chapter re...

Education for sustainable development is gaining traction in sustainability discourses and policies to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of climate change mitigation and adaptation. In the United States, university-led initiatives are being promoted to provide experiential learning platforms to empower students for climate action. One...

This study examines the effect of climate change knowledge, anxiety, and experience on climate adaptation using survey data from 874 farmers in the Western North Region of Ghana. To present unbiased estimates, the instrumental variable regression technique was applied to control for endogeneity. Results indicated that climate change anxiety and kno...

Purpose This paper analyses changes in the activity pattern of Damascus city from late modern era (late Ottoman rule) to the contemporary era. The research objective is to explore the impact of the socio-historical process on the evolving morphological structure of the urban core and to draw implications for post-war reconstruction. Design/methodo...

This study examined the temperature variations in West Africa's Volta River Basin (VRB) from 2021 to 2050 in comparison to the historical period (1985–2014) under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathway Scenarios (SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5). Datasets from three Global Climate Models (GCMs) of the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) were used....

This study sought to unravel the conditions of the walking environment, and residents lived experiences of walking in two urban neighbourhoods in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA). Drawing on a participatory mapping exercise and a total of 70 community and institutional qualitative interviews, the results revealed that the study neighbourh...

Studies have indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on businesses, and that female-led businesses have been more negatively affected than male-led ones because of their fragility, unpredictability, and lack of state support. One such group that has suffered because of the official closing of borders during the pandemic is informal c...

Resilience measurement is an emerging topic in the field of disaster risk reduction. However , its application in Global South cities has proven to be a challenge due to the uniqueness of southern urbanisms and data challenges. As a result, the Resilience Benchmarking Assessment and Impact Toolkit (RABIT) framework has recently been developed to su...

In the Global South, the COVID-19 crisis has compelled varied efforts to quickly address the pandemic's impact on urban livelihoods. Families, friends as well as public, private, and civil society organizations have mobilized various resources to avert the pandemic's onslaught on the survival of the urban vulnerable. Indeed, there is a burgeoning ‗...

Rapid urbanisation and its associated challenges in Global South countries have necessitated the use of digital technologies in urban management. Key to their successful utilisation for urban management is residents' perceptions and utilisation of these technologies. Yet, little attention has been given to this area of research. Using data gathered...

Purpose –– The study aimed at investigating residents' concerns about rainwater harvesting and its use among households in the Yilo Krobo Municipality. Methods –– The study used questionnaires to solicit the views of residents in the Yilo Krobo Municipality and the results were analyzed using descriptive and nominal logistics regression approaches...

Climate change has become a global issue, not only because it affects the intensity and frequency of rainfall but also because it impacts the economic development of regions whose economies heavily rely on rainfall, such as the West African region. Hence, the need for this study, which is aimed at understanding how rainfall may change in the future...

Using a mixed-methods research design, this study compares academic performance of males and females studying STEM subjects or courses at the university level with that of the senior high school level performance. The factors contributing to the gender differences in academic performance at the two levels of the educational ladder were also explore...

The introduction of COVID-19 vaccines is viewed by many as an important milestone in controlling the spread of COVID-19 and a critical step toward attaining the required threshold for head immunity. However, accepting a vaccine is key to a successful rollout of any vaccination programme. Using the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization...

Purpose There is an emerging digital turn in urban management in Africa, undergirded by efforts to address the challenges of rapid urbanisation. To ensure that this digitalisation agenda contributes to smart and sustainable communities, there is a need to trace residents' use of emerging digital technologies and address any impediments to broader u...

The digitalisation of urban service delivery and governance in most African countries has been identified as key to addressing the complex urban problems we are confronted with. In following suit, Ghana has introduced the Digital Property Address System (DPAS) as part of its smart urban management agenda. While the existing urban scholarship has en...

Urban marketplace fires in Ghana are chronic, devasting in economic losses and disproportionately impacting informal sector workers. Yet, the scholarly works on urban disasters have focused on hydrometeorological and other man-made disasters to the neglect of marketplace fires, particularly the challenges in risk communication between emergency man...

It is the responsibility of both the national and municipal governments to assure pedestrian safety, which is a fundamental human right. In this brief article, Louis Kusi Frimpong addresses the relationship between a lack of pedestrian infrastructure and health outcomes, as well as some pedestrian infrastructure required to enhance pedestrian safet...

This paper examines (i) the state of environmental conditions in two low-income urban communities in Accra, Ghana, using a Partic-ipatory Rapid Assessment (PRA) method, and (ii) changes in the environmental conditions in the two low-income communities over the years using the PRA method. The PRA was augmented with qualitative interviews with select...

Gender mainstreaming activities in most African countries, even though have received some policy and practical attention, it has largely not achieved the needed results. These policies and programmes have not fostered well towards the conservation of indigenous knowledge systems, for local and national development. Using the phenomenological resear...

Reducing the spread of COVID-19 partly depends on easy access to water to ensure adherence to good hygienic practices. However, most communities in Ghana face a series of challenges in accessing improved water sources. This study seeks to examine water access and its associated challenges, and the various strategies adopted by households to cope wi...

Postharvest loss is a major problem facing agricultural households in the global south. It is in this context that the introduction of hermetic storage bags is viewed by many as a key solution to averting postharvest loss, especially for grains. While there have been policy efforts to increase the availability of hermetic storage bags for farmers,...

This paper examines the career aspirations of male and female students studying Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects at the tertiary level in Ghana and the motivating factors for these aspirations. The study objectives were addressed using data gathered from a survey, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. Chi-s...

In Ghana, the rhetoric of sustainable urban development permeates urban planning and policy. Yet, how this relates to those living at the margins and how their everyday urban struggles mirror the potentials and challenges of achieving the SDGs is rarely grasped. By using in-depth interviews with residents of Old Fadama, an informal settlement in Ac...

Undoubtedly traffic congestion continues to be a challenge that negatively impacts socio-economic activities in most cities in the world. It does not only hinder the smooth movement of people but also freight and services. Admittedly, there have been a number of studies that have examined the causes and effects of traffic congestion in Ghanaian cit...

The city of Freetown is faced with many disaster challenges as a result of rapid urbanization and low institutional capacity in responding to disaster risks. To effectively address these disaster challenges, suggestions have been made to prioritise the role of grassroots organizations, especially their engagement with state actors in addressing com...

There are concerns that responses to urban safety are gradually reinforcing socio-spatial inequalities, with suggestions emphasising community-institutional collaborations for promoting safer urban communities. Yet, the quotidian realities that underpin residents’ lived experiences are scantly used in urban safety strategies, despite that official...

Freetown is confronted with health-related risks that are compounded by rapid unplanned urbanisation and weak capacities of local government institutions. Addressing such community health risks implies a shared responsibility between government and non-state actors. In low-income communities, the role of Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) in comb...

Urbanization has placed considerable constraints on the preservation and maintenance of formal green spaces in African cities. This situation has given attention to the potentials of informal green spaces (IGS). While studies on IGS in African cities is only emerging, scholarly and policy attention to children’s perceptions and use of IGS within Af...

Walking is the dominant mode of transport in informal settlements of the global south, especially in African cities where structural deficits, morphological challenges and ineffective urban development constrains sustainable transport planning for low-income areas. Despite emerging scholarship on walking in Africa, the literature pays little attent...

Providing adequate safety and security for urban residents in major cities in Ghana has been a major challenge for local and national authorities. To enhance safety and reduce both actual and perceived risk to criminal victimisation, urban residents have resorted to the use of access control features such as fences, barbed wires, and burglar alarms...

Crime geography involves the study of the relationships between crime, space, and society through the critical analysis of victims and perpetrators and the impact of crime on society. The subdiscipline provides opportunities to examine the different theoretical perspectives on the spatial or geographical dimension of crime, emphasizing on why and h...

Enhancing public Safety and security is an important determinant of the quality of life of members of society. The sustainable development goal (SDG) 11, emphasizes on the need to promote safe and resilient cities. Despite global and national efforts in promoting safe and secure cities, there is growing concerns and perception of social risk to cri...

This study examines perception of safety and security, factors that influence this perception and the consequences of feeling insecure within Nima, a low-income neighborhood in Accra, Ghana. The study is important because previous studies on crime and insecurity in urban areas in Ghana have concentrated on interurban analysis, with limited attentio...

The problem of crime and insecurity in urban environments are often complex, multilayered, multidimensional and sometimes interwoven. It is from this perspective that recent approaches and strategies aimed at responding to crime and insecurity have looked at the problem from a social, economic, spatial and institutional point of view. In Ghana, the...

This paper examines the effect of instrumental and expressive concerns on public confidence in the police in three different residential areas in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana’s third largest city. The study was important because of the knowledge vacuum that existed in regard to the empirical validity of the instrumental and expressive theoretical framew...

Intra- and inter-regional migration is widely described. Prior studies have attribute varied reasons for this development including the quest for greener pastures and unequal development in northern Ghana. What has escaped critical scrutiny is some migrants’ ability to escape extreme rural poverty, albeit in harsh urban environment. Such a missing...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and fear of crime, and further explore how this relationship is mediated by collective efficacy. The background to this is that while research, mainly based on the experiences of western countries is conclusive on how collective efficacy plays a...

Since the late 1990s, the arguably most problematic regions in Ghana—the three northern regions, accounting for half of the country’s landscape yet the least developed—have come under increased academic scrutiny. This article seeks to interrogate some conventional arguments which attempt to attribute the region’s underdevelopment to its physical an...

Fear of crime continues to be a concern for state security agencies, city planners, and residents living in urban areas. While significant strides have been made by way of research to understand the correlates of fear of crime, which include mainly socio-spatial characteristics of the environment, few of these studies have focused on the intra-urba...