Architecture, Networks, and Collective Action in Urban Ghana’s Compound Houses

• In Event: The Built Environment, Urban Context, and Political Behavior

Abstract

A large literature shows that the local environment around voters can affect their behavior. Most research focuses on the effects of demographic contexts -- the characteristics of the other people around someone. But built environments -- physical architectures and designs -- can also affect political behavior by shaping how social interactions unfold and information spreads. As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, a better understanding of the political effects of urbanization means a better understanding of how the built environments of growing cities shape local political life.

We focus on a common form of residential architecture in a large African city. Compound houses -- in which many separate families cohabit in the same larger structure and share semi-private non-sleeping spaces (e.g., kitchens, living rooms) -- are prevalent in many African cities. We explore the effects of residence in compound houses on neighborhood- and household-level social and political outcomes, hypothesizing that one’s architecturally determined exposure to co-tenants helps create social bonds, facilitates information sharing, and builds inter-ethnic trust, but also helps produce social closure within compounds relative to broader surrounding neighborhoods.

Using highly-disaggregated election results for urban Ghana, we demonstrate that neighborhoods dominated by compound-style houses exhibit higher voter turnout and lower levels of vote heterogeneity, both indicative of greater coordination capacity to overcome political collective action problems. We then use a novel survey in Greater Accra, Ghana’s largest city, to investigate how the specific architectural layouts of different compounds, and residents’ personal locations within these layouts, explain these political trends by determining the contacts and interactions residents have with their neighbors. Specifically, we focus on the role that house architecture plays in individuals’ perceptions of anonymity and visibility and their access to political and social information, including vis-a-vis ethnic outgroups. To our knowledge, this is one of the most systematic investigations of the relationship between residential architecture and political behavior in the urban Global South.

Authors

• Paige Bollen, Ohio State University

• Noah Nathan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology