The impact of shopping-malls in a neoliberal and globalising city context on nearby traditional and existing retail forms : case study of the Accra and West Hills Malls in Accra, Ghana

Abstract

This study situates two of Accra’s iconic shopping malls - the Accra and West Hills Malls in their neoliberal and global place-making processes to explain how they impact nearby informal traders and local small store operators respectively. Urban development values have significantly shifted from governments addressing the most intractable problems such as the urbanisation of poverty and inequalities in third-world cities to pursuing policies that seek to make cities highly competitive for global capital investments. Accra, Ghana's capital, epitomises this ideal, as the city is increasingly positioned as an investment gateway in the West African sub-region. Consequently, Accra’s urban form has changed tremendously at the turn of the 21st century as private capital investments, particularly from global sources transform and modernise the city’s urban built form. Shopping malls are one such investment, and since 2000, they have become ubiquitous and significantly diversified Accra’s retail landscape. This study investigates how the emergence of these two Regional Shopping Centres (RSC) impacts existing and traditional retail forms in their respective locale by attempting to understand; (i). The emerging consumption cultures around the use of malls and the surrounding retail forms. (ii). The trading effects of the transformation on existing traditional retail operators. (iii). The resilience of traditional retail operators in the evolving retail environment. The study used the mixed-method research approach for data collection and analysis. It specifically used surveys, interviews, personal observations, and the review of official documents, media, and academic publications as tools for analysing mall impacts. The key finding was that shopping malls play an important role in enabling and sustaining neoliberal processes shaping urban development in Accra, with ramifications on its immediate surroundings, including the traditional retail environment. I argued that, in the case of the Accra mall, its development has increased the viability of informal retailing in its surroundings. At the same time, a form of ‘revanchist governance’ (forced evictions) is in place, and it’s being used by the local authority to protect the integrity of the mall as an iconic landmark capable of engendering further capital investments. In the specific case of the West Hills Mall, its conception by private capital investors as a catalyst for closing a rent gap by extracting value from cheaper lands through investments in luxury real estate in a peri-urban setting is changing the urban form and the demography of a neighbourhood through urban speculation, and triggering a gentrification process. As such, the study finds these neoliberal urban development ideologies embedded in malls have exclusionary effects on the traditional retail forms around them. Traditional retailers are mostly threatened by displacement, which has repercussions on their trading activities in varied ways, and also their coping strategies. However, it emerged from the study that while informal traders had relatively better coping mechanisms to weather the storm, small local store operators were highly vulnerable, and faced an existential threat. This study suggests that the prevailing neoliberal ideologies around malls have important ramifications in engendering exclusion and compromising the ideals of a sustainable urban future in notoriously informal and poverty-endemic citiessuch as Accra, particularly in the context of high levels of urbanisation and unemployment.