Aïdas Sanogo is a Research Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa, University of Ghana as well as lecturer and researcher in Social Anthropology, at the Centre Universitaire de Manga, Burkina Faso. Rooted in the fields of political and urban anthropology, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, her current research project looks into the intertwined links between urban dwellers’ discourses and practices related to land tenure in Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire and Kumasi, Ghana.
MIASA Project: Land tenure in West African Secondary Cities
Rooted in the fields of social and urban anthropology, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this research project looks into the intertwined links between urban dwellers’ discourses and practices related to land tenure in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso; Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire and Kumasi, Ghana. Using a diversity of land conflicts as an entry point, I analyse how heterogeneous groups of social actors involved in urban land governance interact with each other. As expressed by Förster:
[T]o understand the politics of governance, one firstly needs to analyse the actors and their agency, and secondly, one has to explore how they actually relate to each other, that is how they articulate themselves in view of others, and how they come together as a group (Förstser 2015, 2011).
Drawing on the above citation, I furthermore address urban land governance as the constant balance and imbalance existing within the power relations binding all the social actors involved in land access and property processes in three West African cities. The objective of the research project is to understand and analyse the subtleties inherent to urban land governance in cities that are oftentimes off the research map due to their “secondary” characteristics, as opposed to capital cities.
