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RIGHT TO THE CITY: PROMOTING LOCAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE PHASE OF INCREASING INFORMALITY

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Majority of people in Ghana today live in urban areas. Supporting this population is an informal economy that employs over 66% of the urban labor force. Despite this contribution, businesses in the urban informal economy in Ghana are treated as an illegality and receive less attention from authorities while workers struggle to maintain a decent standard of living. Using a ―right to the city‖ framework, this paper advocates that the fulfillment of the rights of businesses and workers of the urban informal economy should be an aspiration of local economic development (LED) interventions in Ghana.
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Every individual is entitled to a list of inalienable rights. The ultimate of which is the “right to life.” This right transcends the general perspective to which most attention has been given. Firstly, it draws on the factors that deprive people of their entitlement to life. Secondly, it is a demand to ensure that these factors are eliminated while enhancing the factors that sustain life. For many developing economies, rights have been limited to political misconceptions and misinterpretation. Parochial interests and value-laden partisanship have dominated several urban political processes and politics is delimited to achieving democratic dispensations forgetting that a political dispensation is not merely an end in itself. It is mostly part of the means to achieve a greater goal of “right to life.” This paper, advocates “right to life” as an underpinning criterion for examining urban development practices. This has been made using experiences from Ghana.
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