Seth Asare Okyere

University of Pittsburgh | Pitt · Urban studies

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...

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-...

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...

This book takes a theoretical and empirical distance from urban slums/low-income settlements as a threat to environmental sustainability and recast them as places where environmentally rehabilitative and circular practices occur—drawing on the theoretical lens of the circular economy (CE). CE is defined as regenerative system that minimizes waste,...

Informal urbanization in the Global South has, over the years, received scholarly and policy attention. Amidst this sphere of urbanism are the growing socioeconomic and environmental laggardness and challenges which drive the adoption of circularity practices. This chapter aims to examine the linkages between informal settler practices and circular...

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...

This concluding chapter weaves together the individual contributions in this book to develop a slum-circular economic model that aligns slum livelihoods, slum spatial appropriations, and slum housing with the core principles of the circular economy. The chapter makes the case for a just circular transition. It argues that policies that instill dist...

The reality of informalization and ‘slummification’ of Global South cities has garnered much interest in academic and policy circles at international, national, and local levels, as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals, the New Urban Agenda, and even broader issues around Sustainable Futures. Here, the Circular Economy (CE), which encompa...

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...

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...

The circular economy (CE) is touted to have the potential to support the much-needed shift away from the current linear production and consumption economic model. However, many of the discussions on the CE have overlooked cities in the Global South, casting their pervasive slums as enclaves of socio-environmental problems and a barrier to sustainab...

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...

The Talensi district is highly exposed and sensitive to climate variability and extremes with limited capacity to adapt. The chapter, therefore, investigates climate variability and extremes and household food security among crop-livestock smallholder farmer households in the district. The study employed a mixed-method approach that spanned eight m...

Social capital constitutes an important resource in vulnerable cities of the developing world where formal disaster management capacities are weak, responses are limited, and socio-economic deprivations run deep along spatial dimensions. Yet, little is known about how the different types of social capital contribute to flood preparedness and better...

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...

In recent years, sustainability concerns have gained increasing attention among countries and stakeholders worldwide. Towards the transition to sustainable rural development, the rural web framework (RWF) has become a consistent tool. Indicators from the RWF have been used to explore sustainable rural development for decision-making tasks, which im...

Community water projects offer an economically attractive and physically accessible solution for livelihoods. Piase Community Water Project (PCWP) was initiated in 2005 to provide potable water to the rural communities surrounding Piase. Using data from a field survey with sampled participants in the Bosomtwe district, where this rural water projec...

Semiarid savannah agro-ecological zones are considered climate vulnerability hotspots. In Ghana, smallholder farmers in such agro-ecological zones are impacted by climate change due to their agro-based livelihoods, subsistence nature and extensive reliance on rain-fed agriculture. For such climate vulnerability hotspots, scholars and policymakers r...

The discourse on urban innovations is largely positioned in the Global North, often conceived within the entrepreneurial and managerial forms of high-tech services and products. Unfortunately, the socio-spatial configuration and transformation of urban spaces by residents of informal cities in the Global South, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, a...

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...

Implementing climate-smart agriculture (CSA) provides adaptation and resilience pathways to address the negative ramifications of climate change impacts. CSA mainstreaming is strong at the global and national levels. It however remains a challenge at the local level. In the quest to understand CSA mainstreaming at the local level, we utilized mixed...

Integrating resilience attributes into local plans is considered an important step in enhancing disaster risk reduction. However, the extent to which resilience is captured in local disaster management plans remains underexplored. This paper utilizes content analysis to examine the integration of the UNDRR's resilience attributes across 11 cities i...

Dhaka, a megacity at the forefront of rapid, unplanned urbanization, is considered to be one of the flood-prone cities in the world. The city’s eastern fringe, though underdeveloped and low-lying, is experiencing rapid growth as a result of migration, which has compounded the nature and extent of flood vulnerabilities. Overflow of surrounding river...

Flood vulnerabilities and eviction threats are challenges informal settlement residents encounter in urban Africa. Although recent literature posits emerging residents’ coping and adaptive capacity to flooding, research on African cities is scarce. To address such a knowledge gap, this chapter explores micro-level flood response strategies in Old F...

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...

This paper utilizes mixed-content analysis to assess the mainstreaming of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in eleven local development plans for the 2018-2021 plan period of Ghana's semi-arid Upper West Region. The study found that awareness of climate change impacts on agriculture is strong but mainstreaming of climate-smart agriculture into the pl...

The socio-spatial configuration and transformation of urban spaces by residents of informal cities of the global south, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa, are mostly left out of the urban innovation discourse. They are rather conceived by such nomenclature as primitive, chaotic, and survivalist. The myriad ways residents of informal cities confront t...

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...

In Africa, climate change impacts including, but not limited to, erratic rainfall and prolonged droughts are already affecting farmers' productivity and disrupting households' livelihoods. Following this realization are recommendations for implementing climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as adaptation and resilience pathways to address the negative ram...

This paper analysed socio-spatial changes in old urban neighbourhoods (Danwei compounds) in Chinese cities as a result of two major national level reforms: the Reform and Opening Up and the Urban Housing reform in 1978 and 1997, respectively. Existing research indicates fundamental changes have taken place in the political, economic and social aspe...

The aim of this study is to understand the relationship between human behavior and street typology in urban kampong (informal settlements). This research study is an extension of earlier work by the authors which looked at the relationship between human behavior and street typology in the inner-city kampong. For the purposes of this paper, the focu...

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...

Danwei compounds have experienced a steady decline since the 1997 Urban Housing System Reform. Existing research suggests that Danwei compounds, which were characteristically walled neighbourhoods of work and residence, have experienced socio-spatial changes in social structure, community management and spatial form. However, there is limited under...

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the mechanism of water and sanitation management in the Abese indigenous quarter of La district, Accra, Ghana. This informal quarter is mainly composed of community relatives known locally as clan, who are the core actors in the management of common facilities, including water and sanitation. The north area o...

Purpose This paper aims to bring the more recent discourse on the multilayered and interconnected dimensions of flood vulnerability, damage and risk reduction at the microlevel of global south cities to Dhaka, by looking at multiple factors and their relationships. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional research design was used to generate...

This study targets Takamatsu Marugamemachi shopping street (Takamatsu-shi, Kagawa) where rates it as a best practice, and where commercial activities are integrally operated both redeveloped and undeveloped districts. Then, this study is aimed to consider economic system which supports its society and space from behind as Area’s Context (Organizati...

The future is urban. What cities will look like, whether they serve the privileged few or the deprived many, depends heavily on the right management. This essay, written for the German Development Agency (GIZ) Akzente Special Edition on Cities, explores the contested nature of Africa's urbanisation and urban development with a particular focus on G...

In Eastern Dhaka, perennial flood remains a constant threat to people and livelihoods. Learning from the micro-level experiences of the poor in the peri-urban areas of Dhaka provides insights on the intersections between physical vulnerability, flood response strategies, and adaptive capacity. Through a convergent mixed method, this study examines...

Floods are the second most prevalent and devastating natural disasters in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2000 and 2019 floods accounted for 64% of all disaster events in the region. They affected the livelihoods of about 53 million people and killed more than 14,000. Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique...

Over the last three decades, Bangladesh has implemented various initiatives to address different climate change impacts. In a multi-level governance arrangement, addressing climate change impacts is often constrained by climate change mainstreaming. In Bangladesh, a crucial question that arises is how mitigation and adaptation efforts are addressed...

This study pursues two objectives regarding Matsumoto District of Nagata Ward in Kobe, where reconstruction from the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake has been implemented. The first is to comprehend a series of local contexts to address “universal themes” such as such “readjustment of open socio-spatial structure toward a community” in the ward befor...

Bangladesh experiences perennial flooding as it is at the confluence and delta area of the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna rivers. In recent years, perennial flooding in urban areas has led to serious situations, which has become a challenge beyond the capacity of local governments. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the physical vul...

Purpose Disaster information is an important resource for flood preparedness, however, the transition of information provision to preparedness and consequently to damage reduction is complex. The nature of complexity has made it imperative to provide context-specific evidence on how disaster information provision influences intentions to prepare fo...

In this urban century, cities have become complex systems that intersect and underpin the many dimensions of human society. Urbanization and the digital revolution alone, represent two of the most episodic events in human history. Together, this interlocking pattern of people and technology reinforces the complexity and complications that character...

Sub-Saharan Africa is already experiencing the realities of a changing climate – and the situation is only going to get worse. The reasons for this are complex. And they’re exacerbated by deficits in the region’s infrastructure, services and socio-economic dynamics. Urbanisation is another major factor. The continent’s current urban population is o...

This presentation asks grounds everyday life in an indigenous quarter in Accra through a philosophical exploration. It posits that self-organisation and spontaneous spatial structure could shed light on the mechanisms through which informal settlements become 'places' that are full of 'life' by contextualising the works of Christopher Alexander and...

This chapter draws lessons from Japanese machizukuri activities, which represent one of the most dynamic opportunities for participatory climate change adaptation in Africa. This chapter adopts a literature-based exploratory and dialectical approach to examine community’s role in climate change adaptation. It highlights the challenges and recent co...

This study examines the relationship between human behavior activities and the street typology of Kampong Kebon Kacang in the central Jakarta administrative city of Indonesia. Using mixed qualitative methods of interviews and observation, the survey was undertaken in two selected community groups representing 110 houses and 693 activities. The surv...

Informal settlements continue to remain a significant component of many cities in the developing world. UN-Habitat describes them as lacking security of tenure, not having durable housing and short of basic services. Globally, almost one billion people are hosted in informal settlements. This is expected to increase to 1.5 billion by 2020

There’s rapid urbanisation happening across Africa. But the rural population hasn’t stopped growing. In fact, Africa is considered a rural continent – only 43% of its total population lives in cities and towns. Often policies focus on rural areas or urban expansion. In fact, the key issue for regional development is to take into account the relatio...

A significant portion of people who migrate from rural to urban areas across Africa end up trapped in slums, where living conditions are characterised by overcrowding, poor housing, limited access to water and sanitation, and insecure tenure. Many of these informal settlements are largely treated as a nuisance by authorities. This condemns millions...

Mozambique was the site of one of Africa’s most devastating natural disasters in recent times. In the year 2000 floods killed 700 people, displaced 60,000, and left more than 500,000 needing humanitarian assistance. The disaster also inflicted economic damage totalling over US$273 million – that’s 6% of Mozambique’s GDP.

Our study zoomed into an informal settlement called the Abese Old quarter of La Dadekotopon District. The study looked at how self-organisation in the area is shaping up. We also explored how the organisation could be engaged by authorities. http://theconversation.com/policymakers-have-a-lot-to-learn-from-slum-dwellers-an-accra-case-study-96940

In this invited viewpoint article, delivered at the Zigurat Institute of Technology (Barcelona) international seminar on smart cities and published by Building Information Modelling (BIM), Dr Seth Asare Okyere, a development planner and Assistant Professor, poignantly argues that: The merit of civic engagement for social innovation is that it per...

We are witnessing what Hart (2013) has referred to as the great ‘human transformation’ of our times: the fact that the world has grown into billions of people on a single planet, and more so, half of these billion people are living in major towns or cities. Strikingly, this is occurring at a very strange period of what could be referred to as multi...

This discussion paper argues for a humanistic approach to city planning and development by building on the human economy framework proposed Hart.