While developing the intervention strategies for the territory of the former colonial dam in the center of Tamale, Ghana, this research unveiled the complexity of the notion of infrastructure: associated with extraction, exploitation, and authority, but also, contrary to aspects mentioned above, with self-regulation, economic prosperity, and informality.
Looking backward provided a broader range of lenses for looking at the physical and social values of the project territory, through finding deep relations of infrastructures to the colonial reshaping of economic networks, but also through understanding its potential importance towards achieving independence of the country in the postcolonial period. It can become an instrument for breaking the patterns that started to take on a more disguised representation. While looking at the present conditions, new, invisible infrastructural networks like mobile money were investigated, which started to appear due to digitalization and in favor of supporting informal economies. Occupation of the site, which became farmland after the dam’s collapse, led to the study of urban agriculture. Commodity flows, as well as patterns of food consumption and rates of import, became points of interest.
How can new urban strategies be based on an alternation of infrastructural models toward decentralization, transparency, and publicness? Gaining the possibility of direct control over them affects collective structures, self-rule erases implied external dependency on infrastructures that were built on the colonial foundation. What is the spatial answer for understanding infrastructure as the crux of economic prosperity, an instrument to act against imposed authorities, and an essential tool for redistributing power?
