Spaces of market politics: Retailscapes and modernist planning imaginaries in African cities

This article interrogates the spatial, economic, and cultural underpinnings of traditional retailscapes in sub-Saharan Africa to understand how they intersect with contemporary urban planning policies. It does so by deploying a multi-step investigation of the issues from four perspectives: transportation corridors, spheres of influence, centrality, and observed spatial patterns – each leading us to connections between retail spaces and planning of African cities. Our analyses of 22 traditional satellite markets in Kumasi are distilled into four key findings. First, these markets emerge along, and at the intersection of, intra- and inter-urban road networks as a means of granting local access to indigenous goods and services. Second, the spatial distribution and spheres of influence of the markets partly support Christaller's hypothesis regarding the willingness of people to travel far distances to access higher-order goods and services. The hypothesis fails, however, to recognize that some traditional markets can still have high spheres of influence without providing higher-order goods and services because they constitute vital nodes in the rural-urban food networks. Third, we find a spatial clustering of these markets, suggesting agglomerative tendencies among the markets. Finally, we argue that the observed spatio-social patterns of Kumasi's retailscape only make sense if they are situated within the city's modernist urban planning imaginaries. Specifically, the city's retailscape embodies ongoing placemaking strategies, which involve the expropriation of urban spaces from traders to modernize the cityscape.