Beyond the binary: Hybrid urbanism and the limits of the (in)formal in Accra

Introduction: Seeing beyond the state

Urban governance in much of the Global South is too often defined by what the state sees and controls, through formal planning, visible infrastructure, and bureaucratic regulation (Beier et al., 2022; Boudreau and Davis, 2017; Huchzermeyer, 2021; Roy, 2005). As James Scott (1998: 86–146) famously argued, the state’s imperative to make populations and spaces “legible” has shaped not only how cities are governed but also what kinds of knowledge and authority are rendered real. From colonial cadasters to contemporary planning regimes, state visibility—manifested through documentation, zoning, cadastral maps, and infrastructure—has defined what is recognized as a legitimate urban order (Robinson, 2006; Scott, 1998). Yet in cities like Accra, where a significant portion of housing, infrastructure, and livelihoods operate outside the formal purview of municipal public administration, this paradigm reveals more about what public officials hope to see than about how the city actually works (Boamah and Amoako, 2020; Huchzermeyer, 2004; Paller, 2019; Simone, 2004). What remains illegible to municipal administration is not peripheral or residual; it is foundational to how the city functions (Awal and Paller, 2016; Boamah and Amoako, 2020; Paller, 2019). For a large proportion of Accra’s residents, so-called informal settlements and livelihoods are not a marginal residue of failed planning (Afenah, 2012; Varley, 2013); they are the primary terrain through which the city is inhabited, organized, and made to function (Auyero, 2000; Croese et al., 2016; Fernandes, 2007).

This article challenges the enduring binary between formal and informal urbanism by focusing on the regulatory work of everyday life in Accra, Ghana. In both policy discourse and spatial imaginaries, “informality” receives characterization as a temporary aberration or a symptom of state failure (Gulyani and Bassett, 2008; Huchzermeyer, 2013; Weinstein, 2014; Zeiderman et al., 2015). A substantial body of scholarship has challenged this framing. Roy (2005, 2009) demonstrates how the state itself produces informality through selective “unmapping” and deregulation, revealing informality as a mode of governance rather than its absence. McFarlane (2019) examines how urban fragments coalesce into functioning assemblages. Banks et al. (2020) and Meth (2020) document the regulatory capacities of informal settlements, while Beier (2023) shows how “ordinary neighborhoods” operate through their own governance logics. Koster and Smart (2019) trace the anthropological dimensions of these entanglements. This literature has successfully unsettled the formal/informal binary. Yet a crucial question remains undertheorized: if hybrid urbanism is not merely a static condition but an ongoing process, how does it emerge, and what happens when it is disrupted?

Drawing on the concept of hybrid urbanism developed by Rosen and Gribat (2025), this analysis demonstrates that regulatory authority is neither absent nor monopolized by municipal authorities but rather shared, contested, and enacted through diverse actors and systems. This research extends their framework by attending to the temporality of hybrid urbanism: the processes through which entangled governance arrangements form, stabilize, and can be destroyed. Engaging with Lawhon et al.’s (2023) concept of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and Jaglin’s (2014) work on delivery configurations, the article shows how hybrid urbanism operates not only in infrastructure and service provision but across the full terrain of everyday urban governance. Rather than representing a transitional moment on the path to formalization, hybrid urbanism constitutes a durable condition that requires recognition as a legitimate mode of urban governance.

Before proceeding, two definitional clarifications are necessary. First, governance in this article refers to the regulatory practices, norms, and authority structures that organize daily urban life—land access, market operations, dispute resolution, spatial order—regardless of whether they emanate from state institutions. This definition follows scholarship that recognizes governance as socially distributed rather than state monopolized (Deuskar, 2020; Simone, 2004). Second, a singular definition is not imposed on informality. Instead, the research analyzes how different actors—state planners, residents, traditional authorities—deploy the category strategically. As Roy (2005) argues, informality is not an objective condition but a political designation. Traditional leaders in Ghana, for example, are legally recognized in the national constitution, yet are frequently labeled “informal” in planning discourse. The analytic value of hybrid urbanism lies precisely in its refusal of these categorical distinctions.

This article makes three contributions. First, it introduces the concept of graduated integration to understand how hybrid urbanism develops: the slow, iterative process through which formal and informal governance arrangements become mutually constituted over time. This concept builds on but extends Simone’s (2004) influential theorization of “people as infrastructure.” Where Simone emphasizes the situational and improvisational character of such arrangements, graduated integration captures how improvisation sediments into durable regulatory structures through accumulated relationships, trust, and institutional memory. Second, the article theorizes planning without integration as its counterpart: state interventions that impose formal order without recognizing or incorporating existing hybrid governance, thereby destroying the social infrastructure that took years to build. Third, the article proposes social infrastructural acknowledgment as a normative framework for planning practices that recognize and build upon existing hybrid governance rather than treating it as an absence or disorder.

Empirically, this analysis draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Accra’s Old Fadama/Agbogbloshie and Adjen Kotoku neighborhoods. Using narrative interviews, participant observation, and social network mapping, this research documents how residents navigate complex systems of housing, infrastructure, and economic opportunity, often with minimal or tacit acknowledgment without intervention from municipal authorities.

Theoretical framework: Hybrid urbanism as process

The formal/informal binary has been subjected to sustained critique. Roy’s (2005) foundational intervention demonstrates that informality is not the object of state regulation but its product. The state produces informality through selective recognition, strategic neglect, and what she terms “unmapping.” Crucially, Roy (2009) shows that formal institutions themselves operate informally, skirting laws and regulations in ways that remain unmarked because they are associated with powerful actors rather than the urban poor. This insight is central to understanding hybrid urbanism: the entanglement of formal and informal is not limited to marginalized settlements but characterizes urban governance writ large.

Building on this foundation, scholars have examined how urban life is organized through what Lawhon et al. (2023) call “heterogeneous infrastructure configurations”—assemblages of state, market, and community actors that together produce urban services. Jaglin (2014) similarly theorizes “delivery configurations” that exceed the conventional public/private binary. These frameworks illuminate how infrastructure and service provision operate through hybrid arrangements. Yet governance extends beyond infrastructure to encompass the full terrain of everyday urban regulation: land access, market operations, dispute resolution, spatial order, and the enforcement of social norms. Rosen and Gribat’s (2025) concept of hybrid urbanism offers a framework capacious enough to capture these dynamics. Rather than measuring urban governance against a state-centric ideal, hybrid urbanism foregrounds the co-production of order by both state and non-state actors. It accounts for the layered, negotiated, and often contradictory ways in which cities are inhabited and governed. This framework moves beyond the question of whether the binary holds (it does not) to examine how formal and informal logics, institutions, and practices become entangled in specific urban contexts.

Yet existing scholarship has largely treated hybrid urbanism as a condition to be described rather than a process to be explained. We know that formal and informal are co-produced, but less attention has been paid to how this co-production unfolds over time, or what happens when it is disrupted. This is the gap the present article addresses.

Hybrid urbanism in practice: Two ethnographic vignettes

Two neighborhoods in Accra ground the theoretical claims of this article: Old Fadama/Agbogbloshie and Adjen Kotoku. These sites are linked by the Ghanaian government’s longstanding attempts to regulate and relocate so-called informal settlements, yet they differ markedly in form, function, and governance. Old Fadama is a densely populated, centrally located settlement that has long operated outside the formal planning framework (Afenah, 2012; Boamah and Amoako, 2020). Municipal authorities planned and built Adjen Kotoku as a relocation site meant to absorb those displaced from Old Fadama (Business Ghana, 2022; City of Accra, 2012; Stacey et al., 2021). Taken together, these two neighborhoods offer a comparative lens for examining the co-production of urban order, one emerging from resident-led improvisation and negotiated authority, the other from state-led planning and its discontents.

Crucially, these cases are not merely two examples of hybrid urbanism; they represent distinct moments in its processual trajectory. Old Fadama illustrates graduated integration: hybrid governance that has developed over decades through the slow accumulation of relationships, institutions, and mutual accommodations between formal and informal actors. Adjen Kotoku illustrates planning without integration: what happens when state intervention destroys existing governance infrastructure and residents must rapidly reconstruct hybrid arrangements under unfavorable conditions. This comparison moves the analysis from describing hybrid urbanism to theorizing its production, destruction, and reproduction.

Old Fadama/Agbogbloshie: Graduated integration

Located just northwest of Accra’s Central Business District, Old Fadama and Agbogbloshie are often conflated by outsiders and officials alike. Yet, while Agbogbloshie is considered a legal settlement, Old Fadama is classified as an illegal spillover that began in the 1980s (Afenah, 2012; Boamah and Amoako, 2020). This administrative distinction masks the spatial, social, and infrastructural interdependence of the two areas, which collectively house between 40,000 and 80,000 residents (Afenah, 2012; Daily Graphic, 2012). Most residents lack formal title to land, and the built environment consists mainly of self-constructed wooden, mud, and metal kiosks. With limited state-provided infrastructure, the settlement lacks adequate water and sanitation services. Yet to focus solely on what municipal authorities do not see is to miss the elaborate systems of coordination, hierarchy, and mutual support that structure everyday life. Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this research revealed that there was not an absence of governance but its proliferation—a dense, layered regulatory landscape that has developed through graduated integration. This process is characterized by several features: the slow accumulation of relationships and trust over time; the iterative mutual adjustment of formal and informal actors; the sedimentation of improvisation into durable institutional arrangements; and the development of locally legitimate authority structures. Understanding these features requires attention to how the settlement’s governance systems actually operate.

Far from chaotic or unplanned, settlement in Agbogbloshie operates through a dense network of social and spatial norms. While no official cadastral map organizes the area, residents navigate a highly legible social geography. As one resident put it, “Once you cross a certain street, you know you are in a different part because the language changes.” These subtle spatial cues reflect the ethnic clusters that organize residency, caregiving, and support. Newcomers typically receive guidance to sections of the settlement that correspond to their ethnic background, enabling them to integrate rapidly into local networks. This was the case for Esther, a 19-year-old who arrived in Accra alone, with neither money nor a place to stay. When Grace, a market vendor, recognized Esther’s northern accent and vulnerability, she offered her food, shelter, and, eventually, an introduction to Abdul, who helped Esther find shared accommodation. Spatial legibility in Agbogbloshie, then, receives production not through state mapping but through a localized moral geography that aligns space with kinship and region.

For women like Esther, economic life faces even more constraints. She sells vegetables on commission, earning ₵6.50 (about US$ 0.62) on a good day, from which she must repay her suppliers. By day’s end, she may retain only ₵1 for herself. Rent ranges from ₵20 to ₵100 (US$1.90 to US$9.52) per week, an impossible burden for most women on their own. Instead, Esther lives with nine other women in a shared room, pooling resources to meet the Saturday evening rent deadline. “This is the most difficult part of living here,” one resident explained, “because very few people make enough to survive here on their own.”

Economic life in Agbogbloshie is both precarious and deeply embedded in local circuits of obligation and reciprocity. The market serves as the core infrastructure around which much of the settlement’s economic activity organizes. Goods arrive from rural areas by truck, are unloaded by day laborers, and undergo redistribution by porters and market vendors. Most vendors are women; many men work in support roles, hauling loads, fixing kiosks, or providing electricity. Ben, a young self-taught electrician, arrived in the settlement three years ago after hearing from his cousin about job opportunities. In his village, work was scarce and dangerous, especially in the diamond mines. In Agbogbloshie, Ben earns a modest income by wiring homes and businesses, even when that means navigating illegal or informal connections to the electrical grid. On weeks when money is tight, he barters his services with his landlord’s wife, who runs a small beauty shop. This blend of labor, barter, and mutual assistance sustains a micro-economy in which survival depends as much on relationships as on income.

Despite the absence of formal planning regulations, governance in Old Fadama/Agbogbloshie operates robustly, albeit enacted through social, religious, and economic norms rather than bureaucratic agencies (Paller, 2015a; Smit, 2007). Landlords and tenant coordinators set rent ceilings and mediate disputes through customary practices of consultation and consensus building (Meagher, 2010; Paller, 2015a). Religious institutions serve not just spiritual needs but also as emergency housing for new arrivals (Clark, 1994). Informal credit systems operate through market associations, and market women informally govern labor relations, ensuring that even unpaid porters receive compensation, including meals, at the end of the day (Afenah, 2012; Croese et al., 2016). These practices span multiple domains—market regulation by trader associations, land allocation by traditional authorities, dispute resolution by community leaders, and mutual aid networks—and they interact with state systems in complex ways. Traders pay fees to both market associations and municipal authorities; traditional leaders coordinate with elected officials; state infrastructure depends on community maintenance. What makes these arrangements “hybrid” is not that they substitute for state governance but that they are mutually constituted with it.

The hybridity of these arrangements becomes visible in their entanglement with formal state systems. Fieldwork interviews with planning officials revealed that municipal authorities tacitly rely on community governance to maintain order, even as they officially deny the settlement’s legitimacy. As the Director of Physical Planning at the Accra Metropolitan Assembly explained, successful intervention emerges from “continual engagement over time” through which communities “come to understand that yes, they could be here in an informal capacity, but they also needed to help manage the city.” In one striking example, when community members violated an agreed buffer zone near a flood-prone area, “the community and their elders demolished all the structures that had violated the buffer.” When journalists accused the mayor of insensitivity for demolishing structures during the COVID lockdown, the mayor responded: “Go back to the community and ask who carried out the demolition. I have no hand in it. This was a community initiative.” This mutual accommodation—the state benefiting from community-maintained order while officially denying the settlement’s legitimacy—exemplifies hybrid governance.

The state itself also operates informally, bypassing official planning procedures through political channels. As the Director of Planning explained:

The informal way is this: you are here [in the office], and then you get a call, “We are going to undertake a decongestion exercise. The mayor is going to move these people.” And so you follow along. He has his own arrangements. All you hear is that the politicians keep it [the information] to themselves; they have their own people. The next moment, you hear: “They are demolishing [the settlement], and they are relocating [the residents].” And then we [the formal planners] just sit here. We are not involved, honestly.

This is an informal state action. Decisions made outside formal planning committees are communicated through personal networks, which illustrates Roy’s (2009) point that formal institutions themselves operate informally. Revenue collection further demonstrates the entanglement of formal and informal systems. Residents described paying levies to both state and community actors:

If you carry goods to [the lorry station], there is a gate. You pay a levy before you cross. If you don’t have the 50 pesewas, sometimes you just can’t go through the gate. The government has announced that they are stopping unofficial fees, but they [the state tax collectors] find another way. Whether you like it or not, you pay them. Every Sunday, the police or tax collectors come.

This parallel system—official and unofficial fees collected by formal and informal actors—constitutes hybrid governance in its most concrete form.

Grace’s role also exemplifies this hybrid governance. She is neither a government official nor an NGO representative, but she serves as a gatekeeper and caretaker within her micro-community. Community members recognize her authority through her track record of reliable assistance and her proven ability to connect newcomers to resources. Having once experienced Esther’s circumstances, she now ensures that newcomers find shelter, food, and a sense of connection. Her authority is grounded in moral obligation and community memory, rather than in legal sanction. Similarly, Abdul, whom Esther met at the mosque, serves as a guardian—not by decree but by practice. These forms of authority are deeply relational, often gendered, and grounded in trust, reciprocity, and social standing (Deuskar, 2019, 2020; Paller, 2015b, 2019). These relationships of mutual support also entail dependencies and power asymmetries. Newcomers depend on gatekeepers who can demand compliance in return for access: “Someone who rented a room may be required by the room owner to do certain things in exchange,” as one community liaison explained. Economic precarity enforces deference: “Sometimes someone younger than you will speak to you badly, and because of the scarcity of money, you have to stay quiet.” The point is not that hybrid governance is egalitarian (it is not) but that it constitutes a functioning regulatory system with its own hierarchies, accountabilities, and mechanisms of redress.

The governance structure itself is hierarchical and formalized within its own terms. As residents explained: “There are full chiefs in Agbogbloshie. Everything is in place. And the highest [ranking chief] is Ghanaian. Every emergency, he is the one you go to.” Land allocation operates through recognized procedures:

You would have to go to the chief. The chief will show you where to build. And if that place is already occupied [without the chief’s knowledge], the occupant will be in trouble. If it is free [available], you can go ahead and build. And even when you are building, if it is going to come [impede] onto the road, they [the chiefs] will not agree. They will make you shift it inside [within the established boundaries]. They will measure the placement, because if you build onto the road, when vehicles come, there will be a problem.

This is not improvisation but institutionalized governance with clear rules and recognized authority—rules agreed upon with state and non-state actors. The graduated character of this integration is crucial. Grace did not arrive in Old Fadama with the authority she now commands; she built it over years of demonstrated reliability. The market associations did not spring into existence fully formed; they developed through iterative negotiation with traders, landlords, municipal authorities, and traditional leaders. The social geography that enables newcomers like Esther to find their place was not planned; it emerged through countless individual decisions that accumulated into recognizable patterns. This is what distinguishes graduated integration from mere improvisation: the temporal depth that transforms ad hoc responses into institutionalized arrangements. It is also what makes such governance systems vulnerable. What takes decades to build can be destroyed in a moment by planning interventions that refuse to recognize it.

Taken together, the stories of Ben, Esther, and Grace reveal a regulatory landscape in Agbogbloshie that is neither ungoverned nor chaotic but instead is organized through dense networks of social ties, reciprocal obligations, and informal authority. Infrastructure is improvised but functional; housing is insecure but collectively negotiated; livelihoods are precarious but embedded in systems of mutual aid. These arrangements reflect not the absence of governance but the presence of an alternative urban order—one that operates from below, often beyond the state’s gaze.

Adjen Kotoku: Planning without integration

If Old Fadama reflects the dense, negotiated regulation of urban life from within, then Adjen Kotoku reveals what happens when state-led planning collides with the social logics of informality. Located roughly 30 km from Accra’s city center, Adjen Kotoku received promotion in the mid-2000s as a model resettlement site for displaced residents of Old Fadama (Boakye and Boakye, 2021; Business Ghana, 2022; Crentsil and Owusu, 2018). Yet what unfolded in Adjen Kotoku was not the seamless integration of the urban poor into formal housing but rather a series of mismatches between state intentions and residents’ lived realities. Adjen Kotoku thus serves as a case study in planning without integration: state intervention that imposes formal order without recognizing or incorporating existing hybrid governance, thereby destroying the social infrastructure that took years to build.

The Accra Metropolitan Assembly, in partnership with international donors, planned Adjen Kotoku as a rational, formal alternative to the perceived “chaos” of Old Fadama. The master plan included paved roads, masonry storage facilities, sewer infrastructure, and designated trade areas (Business Ghana, 2022; City of Accra, 2012; Stacey et al., 2021). Government officials even arranged for relocated residents to rent rooms from existing residents in nearby houses, with the promise of state-built housing to come. This vision was predicated on a fundamental misrecognition: the assumption that Old Fadama lacked governance that needed to be preserved or incorporated. By framing the relocation as a move from chaos to order, planners positioned themselves as bringing governance where there was none, rather than as destroying one governance system to impose another. Brutal presence or convenient absence exemplified (Boamah and Amoako, 2020).

However, this formal vision was undermined from the outset. City officials failed to provide transportation for residents or shelter upon arrival. Without official assistance, residents self-organized, with community leaders coordinating transport, allocating market stalls, and negotiating housing arrangements with the local population. The built environment—though formally laid out—quickly became a product of improvisation and resident initiative, echoing patterns familiar from informal settlements. What municipal authorities intended as a planned relocation transformed into a hybrid assemblage of state intention and resident-led adaptation.

The most significant rupture caused by relocation was economic. The decongestion policy focused solely on onion sellers, who were forced to move en masse from Agbogbloshie to Adjen Kotoku. According to the executive director of the Ga Mashie Development Agency (GAMADA), the decision stemmed from the need to reduce market congestion in the CBD, where trucks from Niger and Ghana’s northern regions clogged roads while unloading produce. From a logistical standpoint, this decision appeared sensible. But for the sellers, Agbogbloshie’s density and congestion were assets. “At Agbogbloshie, we could sell five bags of onions in a day,” explained a 31-year-old male onion seller. “It takes us about a week to sell a single bag here [at Adjen Kotoku].”

The official rationale for targeting onion sellers warrants scrutiny. Why onions and not tomatoes? Why this particular group of traders rather than others? As traders at Adjen Kotoku explained: “It was not only the onion sellers who were supposed to relocate but also yam and tomato sellers. Those three things go together. But unfortunately, they only relocated the onion sellers.” The selectivity of relocation suggests that factors beyond traffic congestion determined who would bear its costs. The onion sellers’ vulnerability derived from several intersecting factors. First, they were predominantly migrants from northern Ghana and neighboring countries, particularly Niger, lacking the local political connections of more established trading communities. As GAMADA’s director explained, “most of the trucks carrying onions come from the north,” making the onion trade visibly associated with outsiders. Second, when authorities sought a receiving site, the host community at Adjen Kotoku imposed conditions: “they could only welcome a small and ‘compliant’ group until the government built housing for the rest.” The onion sellers met this criterion as they lacked the political presence and hybridity that the other sellers had established over the years. Therefore, this negotiated acceptance positioned onion sellers as the acceptable face of relocation—sufficiently “legitimate” to be received, yet sufficiently marginal to be displaced. This strategic selection, choosing whom to move based on political vulnerability rather than traffic impact, illustrates how informalization operates: designating certain populations as problems to be solved while leaving equally “congested” activities, such as the tomato and yam sellers, untouched.

Meanwhile, the congestion that planners used as the primary excuse for relocation has been rejected by the residents. At Agbogbloshie, traffic created an impromptu mobile marketplace. Residents could sell directly to passing cars, passengers could make impulse purchases, and thereby a thriving pedestrian economy was sustained. At Adjen Kotoku, distance from the city meant losing these casual customers. “To come here [Adjen Kotoku] from Accra,” another vendor explained, “you have to take a bus and make about three or four transfers, and [it’s] about two hours before you arrive here. We have lost a lot of customers because of this.” To stay afloat, vendors raised onion prices by 50%–75%. This price hike, driven by declining volume and reduced foot traffic, rippled outward: restaurants, households, and farmers in the north, who relied on remittances, were adversely affected. Municipal authorities’ failure to account for the spatial embeddedness of market economies—the identification of commercial opportunities within the interstices of urban life—turned a relocation plan into a disruptive displacement, severing the social and commercial circuits that sustained livelihoods. This is not to say that informality simply “fills gaps” left by formal systems in some functionalist sense; rather, hybrid governance arrangements create and exploit economic possibilities that formal planning categories cannot recognize.

Residents arrived at Adjen Kotoku expecting a new regime of formal municipal support, such as regular service provision, infrastructure maintenance, and institutional mechanisms for addressing complaints. Instead, they encountered institutional absence. “We took care of each other at Agbogbloshie, and now we expect the government to take care of us here. That part has not gone so well,” said Patience, a 38-year-old mother of two. There were no official mechanisms for addressing service failures, no one to call when the water stopped flowing or when the roads began to crumble. This gap between the state’s promise and its capacity is a defining feature of planning without integration. The state’s intervention destroyed existing governance arrangements in the name of providing formal services but failed to deliver them. Residents were left with neither the hybrid governance of Old Fadama nor the formal governance promised at Adjen Kotoku.

The temporal dimension of planning without integration differs fundamentally from the gradual accumulation of graduated integration. Destruction was swift. As one community liaison who had worked in the settlement for 25 years described:

The way the relocation was done, some of those people [residents] were not even informed. They were there one morning, and soldiers surrounded the whole place and started clearing everything. Nobody was given notice. That is how it was done.

What took decades to build was dismantled in hours. The young women who worked with the onion traders, the boys pushing trolleys for scrap dealers, these networks were severed in a day. “We had almost eight hundred young women working with those traders when they were here,” the liaison explained. “Now those trolleys are all parked. They can’t do anything.”

Yet destruction’s speed does not mean nothing survives. Some social ties proved portable: the onion sellers who moved together to Adjen Kotoku brought with them existing relationships, leadership structures, and norms of mutual aid. What was lost was the spatial anchoring of these relationships: the accumulated knowledge of place, the established circuits of commerce, and the institutional memory embedded in particular locations. At Agbogbloshie, traders could move between the market and the lorry station multiple times daily; customers arrived constantly; complementary trades sustained each other. At Adjen Kotoku, this ecosystem was replaced with homogeneity and isolation.

The temporality of state promises adds another dimension. Initial commitments created expectations that formal governance would replace the hybrid arrangements being destroyed. Traders described how “there were buses that were free [or subsidized]. They were specifically for transport between [Agbogbloshie] and this market here. But now there are no more.” Infrastructure promises similarly evaporated: “We came here thinking conditions would be comfortable. And [the government representative] said he will provide [better facilities], but that is yet to happen.” The gap between promise and delivery is not incidental to planning without integration; it is constitutive of it. The state’s intervention destroyed functioning governance while failing to deliver the formal governance it promised, leaving residents with neither.

In this vacuum, residents reactivated older social forms of governance. Community leaders who had previously served at Agbogbloshie took on new roles, coordinating logistics, maintaining market order, and arbitrating disputes. The onion sellers watched each other’s children during the workday and pooled resources to negotiate with landlords. What emerged was not the institutional governance envisioned by planners but a familiar system of mutual aid and informal regulation. Yet this reconstruction differed from what had existed in Old Fadama. The governance systems being rebuilt lacked the temporal depth of graduated integration—the accumulated relationships, established trust, and institutional memory that made Old Fadama’s hybrid governance robust. Residents were improvising, but improvisation had not yet sedimented into a durable structure.

The homogeneity of trade at Adjen Kotoku also limited the social infrastructure that had existed at Agbogbloshie. There, trade diversity enabled a dynamic network of interdependence between transporters, loaders, vendors, and support services. At Adjen Kotoku, where everyone sold onions, these complementarities were lost. Social networks remained strong but functionally narrower, less able to accommodate new entrants or adapt to shocks. This points to another cost of planning without integration: the loss of the diversity that made Old Fadama’s hybrid governance resilient. Graduated integration, developing over decades, had produced an ecosystem of interdependent livelihoods. Relocation shattered that ecosystem, concentrating a single trade in an isolated location with diminished adaptive capacity.

Residents expressed deep pessimism about reconstruction. When asked about the future, one trader responded:

The situation will get worse. Because if you look at this market now, in two or three years, it is going in a direction people don’t fully understand yet. But if you look at it in 10 or 15 years, the truth is this: 99.9%, yes, things will be worse.

This pessimism reflects residents’ understanding of what was lost: not just market access or customers but the temporal depth of graduated integration that made Old Fadama’s governance systems resilient. They are attempting to rebuild in years what took a generation to construct, under conditions far less favorable than those that enabled the original emergence.

Adjen Kotoku thus stands as a cautionary tale about the destruction of social infrastructure. The relocation did not simply move bodies from one location to another; it severed the governance systems that took decades to build. What municipal authorities saw as disorder—the density, the congestion, the entanglement of formal and informal—was in fact a functioning regulatory landscape. By refusing to see it (a convenient absence), planners destroyed it (a brutal presence). The result was not the transition from informal to formal governance but the replacement of robust hybrid governance with fragile, improvised arrangements that lacked the temporal depth to be resilient.

Discussion: Theorizing hybrid urbanism’s temporality

The preceding case studies of Old Fadama and Adjen Kotoku reveal that the formal/informal binary fails to capture the complexity of urban life in Accra. In both contexts, regulatory authority emerges through a mix of planned interventions and everyday practices, shaped not only by state intentions but also by social networks, market arrangements, and residents’ improvisational strategies. What emerges in Accra is not the absence of governance but its dispersion across a multiplicity of actors, scales, and logics. Yet the comparison reveals something more than the co-production of the formal and informal; it reveals something the existing literature on hybrid urbanism has not fully theorized. These cases demonstrate that hybrid governance has a temporal dimension: it develops through slow processes of accumulated relationship building, and it can be rapidly destroyed through planning interventions that refuse recognition. Old Fadama’s governance systems developed over decades; Adjen Kotoku’s residents are attempting to rebuild in years what took a generation to construct. This temporal asymmetry—slow to build, quick to destroy—has significant implications for how we understand urban governance and plan urban interventions.

The process of graduated integration has several distinguishing features. First, it is temporal: it unfolds over years and decades, not days. Second, it is relational: it depends on the density of social ties and the accumulation of social capital. Third, it is institutional: improvisation gradually sediments into durable arrangements with recognized authority. Fourth, it is adaptive: the system develops the capacity to absorb shocks and accommodate diversity precisely because it has emerged through negotiation rather than imposition.

The concept of planning without integration captures the converse: state interventions that conveniently fail to recognize existing hybrid governance, thereby destroying it. The Adjen Kotoku case reveals several features of this mode of planning. First, it depends on misrecognition: the production of existing informal governance as absence or disorder. Second, it promises formal provision that it cannot or is unable to deliver, leaving residents with neither the hybrid governance they had nor the formal governance they were promised. Third, it severs the social and economic circuits that sustained livelihoods, imposing costs that formal planning categories cannot measure. Fourth, it forces rapid reconstruction under unfavorable conditions, producing governance arrangements that lack the resilience of graduated integration.

The temporal asymmetry between construction and destruction is perhaps the most significant finding of this comparison. Graduated integration is slow: it requires years of accumulated trust, countless negotiations, and the gradual mutual adjustment of formal and informal actors. Planning without integration is fast: a single policy decision can dismantle arrangements that took decades to build. This asymmetry has profound implications for planning practice. It suggests that interventions in hybrid governance should be approached with the recognition that what is destroyed cannot be quickly replaced. The temporal depth of graduated integration is itself a form of social infrastructure that relocation inevitably damages, even when physical infrastructure is provided.

The comparison also illuminates the role of informalizing practices in producing the very dualisms that planning discourse then claims to address. Old Fadama was not inherently “informal.” It was made so by the municipality’s refusal to recognize its local governance systems when convenient. This act of strategic informalization created the discursive conditions for intervention. Understanding hybrid urbanism as a process thus requires attending not only to how governance emerges from below but also to how categories of formality and informality are actively produced from above. As Meth (2020) argues, the sharp distinction between formal housing delivery and informal settlement often functions as a “hyperbole,” exaggerating differences that are, in practice, more blurred. Adjen Kotoku illustrates this: the “formal” resettlement depended on informal arrangements from the outset, while residents’ “informal” responses followed patterns as structured as any formal policy. Additionally, the Adjen Kotoku case is representative of “splintered informalities” (Beier, 2021; Erman, 2016) primarily because the relocation did not eliminate informality but transformed and fragmented it, producing new uncertainties and governance challenges under less favorable conditions than those that enabled residents to thrive at Old Fadama.

Together, these concepts reframe the relationship between state planning and urban informality. The question is not whether to formalize informal settlements, a framing that preserves the binary, but how to engage with hybrid governance in ways that build upon rather than destroy existing social infrastructure. This leads to the normative concept this article proposes: social infrastructural acknowledgment; planning practices that recognize existing hybrid governance as governance, not as disorder awaiting formalization, but as functioning regulatory systems that merit engagement on their own terms. Social infrastructural acknowledgment does not mean romanticizing informal settlements or ignoring their genuine challenges. It means taking seriously the knowledge, practices, and forms of authority embedded in everyday life, and designing interventions that work with rather than against them.

The concept of social infrastructural acknowledgment is not merely a normative proposal; it describes a mode of engagement that some planning officials already recognize as effective. As the Director of Physical Planning explained, successful intervention emerges from “continual engagement over time” through which communities “come to understand that yes, they could be here in an informal capacity, but they also needed to help manage the city.” This official’s observation that “communities need a voice at the decision-making level” articulates, from within the planning apparatus, what social infrastructural acknowledgment would mean in practice. The contrast with the onion sellers’ relocation is stark: where continual engagement produced community self-regulation that authorities could rely upon, the absence of engagement produced destruction that authorities must now manage.

What would social infrastructural acknowledgment look like in practice? In the Accra case, it would have meant engaging with Old Fadama’s market associations and community leaders before designing the relocation; incorporating their knowledge of how the market actually functioned; planning for economic as well as spatial transition; and providing support for the reconstruction of governance systems at the new site. It would have meant recognizing that the “congestion” that planners sought to eliminate was also a commercial ecosystem that sustained thousands of livelihoods. Most fundamentally, it would have meant seeing Old Fadama’s residents not as problems to be managed but as planners in their own right, as actors with knowledge and capacity whom formal planning should learn from rather than displace.

Conclusion: Rethinking the foundations of urban governance

This article has argued that understanding how cities like Accra function requires looking beyond state-centered paradigms of governance and planning. In both Old Fadama and Adjen Kotoku, urban regulation does not begin and end with formal institutions. It undergoes co-production, layering, and deep socialization, built through networks of care, negotiation, and economic interdependence. These practices are not outside the city; they are the city. The article’s contribution has been to push beyond the description of hybrid urbanism toward a theory of its temporality. The article argues that hybrid governance develops through graduated integration, the slow, iterative process through which formal and informal arrangements become mutually constituted over time. It also argues that this can be destroyed through planning without integration; state interventions that impose formal order without recognizing existing governance systems. The comparison between Old Fadama and Adjen Kotoku illustrates both dynamics, revealing what is at stake when planning fails to acknowledge social infrastructure.

The concept of hybrid urbanism offers a crucial analytical tool for unsettling the dominant binary between formal and informal, legal and illegal, and planned and improvised (Deuskar, 2019; McFarlane, 2012; Robinson and Roy, 2016; Rosen and Gribat, 2025). Rather than treating informality as a placeholder for eventual formalization, this framework positions it as a durable, adaptive, and often effective mode of urban regulation. It enables the recognition of actors typically dismissed as marginal—such as tenant coordinators, market women, kinship brokers, and neighborhood intermediaries—as planners and policymakers in their own right (Huchzermeyer, 2021; Paller, 2015a; Meagher, 2010; Simone, 2004). For planners and policymakers, this analysis suggests a fundamental reorientation. Rather than asking how to formalize informal settlements, the question becomes: how can interventions build upon existing hybrid governance rather than destroying it? The concept of social infrastructural acknowledgment offers a starting point. This is a framework for planning that recognizes the regulatory work of everyday life and designs interventions in partnership with, rather than in spite of, the communities it aims to serve. This does not mean that states should withdraw from informal settlements, nor that existing conditions should be romanticized. It means that effective intervention requires first understanding how settlements actually function, and seeing the governance that is there, not only the disorder that planning paradigms expect to find.

For urban scholars, it demands a methodological and epistemological shift: to theorize from below, to reimagine the city not as a space to be ordered from above but as a site of ongoing negotiation between overlapping and unequal regimes of rule. Accra is not a laggard version of a universal urban future. It is a frontline of urban transformation, where the contours of governance undergo redrawing, not through the extension of formal institutions alone but through the inventive, often unrecognized, regulatory work of everyday life (Deuskar, 2019; Robinson, 2006; Roy, 2005; Smit, 2007). The concepts of graduated integration, planning without integration, and social infrastructural acknowledgment are offered as tools for this project, as ways of seeing the city that begin not with what planning paradigms expect to find but with what is already there.