ABSTRACT
Over the years, national and local governments in the global South appear overwhelmed by the enormous task of providing decent and adequate infrastructure and promoting orderly city development. As in many countries, donor agencies in Ghana, particularly the World Bank, have responded by introducing a number of programmatic interventions to install or upgrade urban infrastructure and improve general living conditions in selected cities. However, these external interventions are often clouded by the assumptions and procedures associated with formalised blueprint planning approaches. They tend to consign beneficiaries to witnesses of construction activities rather than decision-makers in infrastructural design and delivery configurations. Drawing on the concept of hybrid urbanisms as an arena of negotiation between formalised and informalised actors and practices, this chapter uses the reconstruction of the Bolgatanga Market in Ghana to demonstrate how non-state actors resist and/or subvert dominant state ideological discourses and infrastructure delivery approaches to blend stakeholder interests and responsibilities in complex but novel ways. It explores how the everyday practices of local market users are setting the agenda for urban planning/upgrading and infrastructural configurations in Bolgatanga. The chapter highlights the potency of resistance from local market users against municipal authorities in shaping infrastructural configuration and delivery.
