Dr Richmond Ehwi

Engaging stakeholders to co-create Smart Cities is an aspiration for many city governments. However, existing stakeholder engagement frameworks tend to be technologically deterministic from the outset, leaving no room for meaningful co-creation. This paper proposes a framework for engaging stakeholders in Smart City development without presuming an already existing technology which stakeholders must accept. The framework follows the life-cycle approach to disaggregate the Smart City development process into seven separate but interrelated stages anchored on three pillars - ‘the right to the city’, ‘the IAP2 spectrum of public participation’ and ‘technological sovereignty’ to highlight issues deemed critical for a meaningful co-creative stakeholder engagement. The study identifies funding, an understanding of the city and its challenges from multiple stakeholder perspectives, the promotion of digital rights, and meaningful stakeholder engagement as four pertinent issues that must be taken on board to move this framework from a conceptual abstraction to a practical toolkit.

As urban governments adopt smart city strategies for delivering services, the need to understand how – and in whose interests – these strategies are formed is imperative. The selection of smart city verticals (or areas of focus for smart city programs) within processes of urban governance has implications for which aspects of the urban agenda become prioritized. Through a study of seven UK smart cities, the paper investigates the framing of city problems, selection of smart verticals, and decision-making logics. The findings highlight that the selection of smart city verticals within the case study cities is rooted in four key considerations: challenges in service delivery, pragmatism, entrepreneurialism, and broader national and global events and policy agendas. These considerations transcend different spatial scales and governance arrangements, raising questions around democratic accountability and transparency. The study concludes that caution is warranted when framing smart cities as a solution to city problems.

In England, provision of temporary accommodation for people experiencing homelessness has often entailed using traditional construction approaches to deliver housing. However, recent experiments are using modular homes to provide temporary accommodation, accompanied by support services for people experiencing homelessness. Given the early nature of these trials, it is unclear what impacts these modular homes have on their occupants and how these projects in turn impact surrounding residents and businesses. We present a case study of the first modular homes for people experiencing homelessness in Cambridge, England, drawing on longitudinal interviews with the six residents occupying these homes. We found that the physical features of the homes, coupled with wrap-around support services, yielded positive short- and mid-term outcomes for occupants, including improved management of their substance use and money, skills development and readiness for employment, social relations, and a burgeoning sense of community, safety, and security. These positive outcomes have spurred wider interest, including the incorporation of modular homes as alternative temporary accommodation in the Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy of Cambridge City Council, alongside a growing research interest in modular homes and other new schemes by the national government. We argue for further empirical studies of the impacts of different modular home projects, including those that admit more diverse resident cohorts and offer different accommodation types to establish a clear methodology for future modular homes projects in England and beyond.

Fiscal constraints facing municipal governments make gated communities that self-finance their amenities a welcome phenomenon. However, studies exclusively devoted to investigating the types of amenities supplied in gated communities and the factors that determine their supply remain unexplored. This paper fills this gap by using survey data from 51 gated communities sampled across the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) in Ghana. After conceptualizing 10 different amenity categories commonly found in gated communities, it finds that security, governance, accessibility, and communal-related amenities are those commonly found in gated communities in GAMA. Multiple linear regression modeling reveals that only four amenity categories, namely, security, governance, communal and health-related amenities have a significant model fit. It further finds that both the “number of houses planned” and the “year project construction began” increase the number of all four amenity categories provided in gated communities. However, other locational, company and project characteristics have a differential impact on the number of these four amenities provided, some of which appear to contradict some existing theoretical propositions underlying the provision of amenities in gated communities. It concludes by reflecting on municipal authorities’ increasing reliance on gated communities to supply amenities in light of the findings.

As Smart Cities have become more widespread, so too have concerns about their associated ethical issues. However, ethical debates in the current Smart City literature have tended to focus on issues related to the collection, processing, usage, storage and sharing of data. This paper argues that ethical debates should be extended to capture crucial decisions taken as part of smart City governance, and the ethical references which underpin them. Using the SmartCambridge programme as a case study, this paper draws empirical data from interviews with experts and actors involved in the programme and highlights the ethical nature of decisions taken in key aspects of Smart City governance. The paper reveals that city officials and programme managers demonstrate acute consciousness of legal regulations, which they employ in decision-making, and are less cognisant of governance principles based on norms and values which are also drawn upon. This paper argues that there is nonetheless ethical content which can be traced in decision-making, regardless of whether ethical concerns are explicitly recognised as such

The Covid-19 lockdown implemented globally to prevent the spread of the virus has led to the closure of schools. However, insight into the impact of the lockdown on private schools and the responses it has elicited is limited, especially across the African continent. This article examines the impact of the lockdown on private basic schools in Ghana and how they responded to the closure. Following "organizational ambidexterity" and qualitative interviews with nine proprietors of private schools in Ghana, the study found that the schools' closure had a negative impact on private basic schools in five crucial ways: disruption to teaching and learning, difficulty in retrieving unpaid teaching fees, inability to pay staff salaries and statutory payments, underutilization of existing assets, and the cost of storing unused stock. The article offers suggestions to the government to support private schools that are broadening educational access at thin profit margins.

Migrants’ remittance to close relatives and acquaintances back home has been widely studied. However, little is known about the impact remittances have on the living conditions of migrants who send these remittances. This paper hypothesises that migrants often deprive themselves of better living conditions in their host countries in order to regularly remit home. We test this hypothesis using survey data from 129 Ghanaian migrants living in the United Kingdom. We develop a Living Condition Index based on migrant participants’ self-assessment of how remittance has impacted their living conditions in the UK and specify a hierarchical multiple regression model to test this hypothesis. Controlling for migrants’ demographic, migration, employment, and remittance information, we find that there is a 19.8% decrease in migrants’ living conditions when they remit more than £150 per month, thereby confirming our hypothesis that remittances adversely impact migrants’ living conditions in their host countries. The paper reflects on the implications of the findings in light of migrants’ living conditions under the current global health pandemic and offers practical suggestions that could help lessen this financial burden on migrants while supporting sustainable businesses back home.

This paper examines the functions walls perform in gated communities from the standpoints of both gated community developers and their residents. It posits three types of walls and scrutinises the purpose for each. Drawing empirical data from face-to-face interviews with 11 developers and 20 residents drawn from two gated communities in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area in Ghana, the paper finds that, contrary to received wisdom, internal cluster walls in gated communities are used to segregate residents into different economic and social classes, often under the pretext of offering them different housing choices. It further casts doubts on the widely touted view that gated communities offer a better sense of security as residents express anxieties over suspected criminals living among them. The paper concludes by calling for a re-examination of several features of gated communities, including the meaning of the concept itself and the typologies that exist to bring out more of such nuances.

Across the globe, private rental housing performs a critical role within modern housing systems. However, the nature of the sector, the households it serves, and the contractual landlord–tenant relationships are markedly different. In this article, we explore Ghana’s informal rental housing market, which provides accommodation to most renters because of limited housing in the formal housing sector. Drawing on exploratory research and survey data from renters in Dansoman, Accra, we contend that landlords’ practice of requiring renters to pay 2 years’ advance rent and to furnish their property imposes significant financial burden on the renters. We further demonstrate the extent to which different categories of renters are made worse off by these financial commitments. As government regulatory powers remain weak, private landlords’ unscrupulous practices have become an accepted social norm. The younger segments of society that are heavily dependent on this sector are, in particular, made considerably worse off, with knock-on consequences for labor mobility and the ability to create well-functioning housing systems.