Walking at the Margins: Spatial Justice, Social Exclusion and Inclusive Mobility in Urban Accra

Abstract

Urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa is remaking how people move, yet pedestrian infrastructure rarely features in urbanisation agendas. Most residents of Accra walk to get where they are going, and those with the fewest alternatives walk the most; however, planning and governance systems have not been built around them. This study examines inclusive walkability in Madina and Adenta, two fast-growing municipalities in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, drawing on semistructured interviews with six elderly residents, ten pregnant women, four persons with disabilities, and two municipal road officials, as well as systematic field observation. We read the evidence through a spatial justice framework that brings together distributive, procedural, and recognitional dimensions, using Social Exclusion Theory to explain how disadvantage is produced and Universal Design to provide criteria for evaluating the built environment. This lets us specify what the Accra scenario adds to transport-related social exclusion scholarship, rather than restating that scholarship in a new setting. We advance three propositions. Exclusion is generated by a custodial gap; the institutional separation of the mandate to build pedestrian infrastructure from the mandate to keep it usable, in which provision decays into exclusion with no actor accountable for the outcome. Transport exclusion here is a condition of the majority mode rather than of a car-less minority, so its causal centre lies in institutional non-recognition of walking rather than in individual resource deficit. And provision itself can exclude through infrastructural inversion, where interventions that reduce aggregate risk redistribute residual risk onto elderly, pregnant and disabled pedestrians, compounding on the same bodies. Building infrastructure is not the same as providing access. We argue that inclusive walkability belongs in debates about governance and justice rather than in the technical registers of transport planning, and that the everyday experience of vulnerable pedestrians is the clearest available evidence of what an equitable urban transition would require.