Housing demand in the urban fringe around Kumasi, Ghana

This research utilizes empirical data to explore the sources of demand and their effects on urban fringe housing around Kumasi, Ghana. The research found that housing demand on the urban fringe has accelerated due to changing values ascribed to traditional rural and modern urban locations and to preferences for single-family homes, strengthened by the Ghanaian expatriate housing demand back home. This demand was expressed in a context of uncertainty created by a complex institutional system, which reinforced the attractions of the fringe locations. These results provide a perspective on urban fringe housing demand that differs from those developed in Western cities and the approaches recently used in accounting for change on the fringes of some South-east Asian cities. The paper concludes that more needs to be done to understand the institutional factors and the way that they influence a drawn-out construction process to account more fully for the mosaic of housing structures scattered haphazardly on the fringes of Kumasi.