An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City
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Planning Theory & Practice ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rptp20 Becoming Vulnerable to Flooding: An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City Clifford Amoako & Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah To cite this article: Clifford Amoako & Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah (2020): Becoming Vulnerable to Flooding: An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City, Planning Theory & Practice, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2020.1776377 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2020.1776377 Published online: 18 Jun 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 41 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rptp20 PLANNING THEORY & PRACTICE https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2020.1776377 Becoming Vulnerable to Flooding: An Urban Assemblage View of Flooding in an African City Clifford Amoakoa and Emmanuel Frimpong Boamahb aDepartment of Planning, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology Kumasi Ghana; bDepartment of Urban and Regional Planning, Community for Global Health Equity, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Assemblage thinking has emerged over the last two decades as an important Received 28 July 2019 theoretical framework to interrogate emerging complex socio-material phe Accepted 27 May 2020 nomenon in cities. This paper deploys the assemblage lens to unpack the KEYWORDS vulnerability of informal communities to flood hazards in an African city. Flood vulnerability; urban Focusing on Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama, the largest informal settlements assemblage; informality; in Accra, Ghana, this paper employs multiple methods including archival Accra; Ghana analysis, institutional surveys, focus group discussions, and mini-workshops to study the processes of exposure and vulnerability to flood hazards in these two communities. We find that being vulnerable to flood hazards in these informal settlements emerges from historically contingent, co- constitutive processes and actants: the city officials’ modernist imaginaries and socio-cultural identities of residents in informal settlements; the social material conditions experienced by residents in these settlements; and the translocal learning networks of government and non-government actors that simultaneously (re)produce oppressive urban planning policies and grassroots resistance to these policies. The paper concludes with a call to urban planners and allied built environment practitioners to understand flood vulnerability as both a process and product of these complex interactions. 1. Introduction Urban floods are among the most devastating hazards affecting many emerging cities, especially in the developing world (Jha et al., 2011a; Parker, 2000, p. 5; Wisner et al., 2004, p. 201). Jha et al. (2011a., p. 3) describe urban flooding as “one of the major natural disasters which disrupts the prosperity, safety, and amenity of residents of human settlements.” The Associated Programme on Flood Management (APFM, 2008), p. 3) attributes urban floods to a “combination of meteorological and hydrological extremes (hydro-meteorological)” but also mentions the influence of human factors in urban flood vulnerability and disasters. The hydro-meteorological factors of urban flood ing include extreme rainfall/precipitation, rainstorms, seasonal rainfall extremes, snowmelt, over flow of rivers and streams, cyclonic/tidal surges, and accumulation of water in low-lying urban areas (APFM, 2008, pp. 4–9; Few, 2003, p. 44). Another cause of urban flooding discussed in the literature is the process of urbanization itself (Douglas et al., 2008, p. 188; Parker, 1999, p. 38). According to Douglas et al. (2008, p. 188), rapid CONTACT Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah [email protected] Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Community for Global Health Equity, University at Buffalo, 226 Hayes Hall, Buffalo, NY 14214, USA © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 C. AMOAKO AND E. FRIMPONG BOAMAH urbanization and unplanned land use changes increase flood risks by restricting the natural flow of surface runoff. In their study of five African cities of Accra (Ghana), Kampala (Uganda), Lagos (Nigeria), Maputo (Mozambique), and Nairobi (Kenya), Douglas et al. (2008, pp. 194–197) discussed the role of rapid and uncontrolled urbanization in flooding. They indicated that urban flooding is aggravated by the development of slums and informal settlements on floodplains, poor household waste collection practices, and maintenance of drainage channels. Urban population growth, social and economic processes have also been cited as crucial factors in increasing the exposure and vulnerability of urban dwellers/citizens to flood hazards, making them almost endemic in the 21st century (Abhas Jha et al., 2011b; Few, 2003; Parker, 2000). Studies about urbanization and flooding,as discussed by many scholars such as Pelling (1997, 1998, 1999), suggest that analysis of climatic conditions and forecasts is necessary but insufficient in unpacking the vulnerability and resilience of urban areas to flood hazards. Sadly, flood hazards and disasters in Global South cities appear to have been largely ignored or downplayed in global policy debates (Tarhule, 2005) partly due to limited empirical and conceptual approaches to unpack who/ what is involved and how they are involved in the production of flood vulnerabilities in Global South cities. A number of existing studies discuss the strong interconnections among urban flood vulner ability, urban poverty, growth of informal settlements, and urban marginalization, especially in the cities of the Global South (e.g., Amoako & Frimpong Boamah, 2015; Douglas et al., 2008; Satterthwaite et al., 2007). In most of these studies, we observe that the process of producing urban flood vulnerabilities in Global South cities is emblematic of what De Landa (2006, p. 5) described as an “assemblage” or the apparent complex relationships among various “people, networks, organizations, as well as, a variety of infrastructural components, from buildings and streets to conduits for matter and energy flows.” This paper deploys an assemblage thinking, discussed over the last few years (e.g., De Landa, 2006; Dovey, 2010, 2012; Farías & Bender, 2009; McFarlane, 2009, 2011a; Wise, 2005), as the conceptual lens to unpack the complex relationships in the production of urban floodvulnerabilities in the Global South. Put differently, we discuss and argue that vulnerability to urban flood hazards in Global South cities is rooted in the complex processes and interactions between environmental changes and socio-political processes explained by their local contexts, history of development and international/global influences. We focus on two informal communities in Accra, Ghana (i.e., Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama), to ground our conceptual discussions in empirics. The remaining sections of the paper are organized as follows; The next section delineates the conceptual landscape of assemblage thinking. In this section, we discuss the defining characteristics of the assemblage concept and highlight the analytical utility of this concept in unpacking the continuously evolving socio-material conditions and vulnerabilities of informal settlements in Global South cities. Then, we apply the assemblage lens to the two case study communities to distil the socio-material context and historically-contingent urban development processes that shape the continuous vulnerability of informal settlement dwellers in Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama. The paper concludes by summarizing the key findings in a matrix and reflecting on the need for urban planners and allied built environment practitioners to understand and specifically address flood vulnerability as both a process and product of complex interactions. 2. Assemblage, Informal Urbanisation and Flood Vulnerability – A Conceptual Framework This paper deploys the assemblage concept as a schema to connect informal urbanization and flood vulnerability, which are the key themes of interest in this paper. The earliest discussion of the PLANNING THEORY & PRACTICE 3 assemblage concept was from the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in their Book “A Thousand Plateaus- Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” The term “assemblage” was translated from the French word “agencement,” commonly translated as “putting together,” and has been explained as “that which is being assembled” (Wise, 2005). Wise (2005, p. 77) argues that the term is not a static one or as an endpoint of “an arrangement.” Instead, assemblage should be viewed as a “process” of becoming, arranging, organizing or fitting together through various levels of relationships. In this process of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 257) highlighted not only the processes involved, but also the compositional elements in the process, their continuous relationships, and what “they can do” individually and collectively in the process of becoming an assemblage. In simple terms, an assemblage is conceptualized as a process of transforming, the coming together, and continuously becoming of various related and unrelated parts through complex inter- relationships. An assemblage gives a sense of becoming “a whole” that emerges from a complex process of putting together component parts, which reflects a particular character and has a territory. However, this explanation of an assemblage does not directly