City Life

Ato Quayson’s work, Oxford Street Accra, took readers on a trip down one of Ghana’s most popular roads in order to investigate the socio-political nature of how public spaces exist and how public spaces are used. Quayson initiated discourse shaped by his application of horizontal archaeology and urban planning theories in order to gauge the shortcomings of a claim he made that was once refuted by a respected friend of his, “Oxford Street is globalization (Quayson, ix). Through his analyses of Oxford Street as an epicenter of culturally, politically, and economically pumped interpersonal interactions, Quayson was able to define and contextualize the terms “nation” and “nationalism” while analyzing their jurisdiction and subsequent limitations within the scope of one of Ghana’s most significant public urban spaces. Subsequently, Quayson also posited that Oxford Street serves to comment upon transnationalism, the ways in which cities are uniquely political spaces, and the types of politics that occur in the streets of Accra. Although Quayson, initially considered Oxford Street the Ghanaian epitome of globalization, his investigation led him to understand that Oxford Street operates most effectively as the point at which social politics and economics converge and nationalism is bred.

Quayson’s look into the way consumers, vendors, civilians, and tourists interact on Oxford Street provides the framework for his argument that nationalism can exist where transnationalism is also evident, this reality only comments upon a nation’s social, political, economic, and commercial growth. While advertisements for goods from around the world and celebrities from overseas line Oxford Street, the cultural phenomena that makes walking down Oxford Street distinctly Ghanaian, still exists Quayson, 14). For instance, those walking down Oxford street will walk in zig-zags, barter and haggle, and then trade insults that are only effective if one understands Ghana (Quayson, 19). “Rather, the character of walking on the street that has just been described exposes itself to the possibility of spontaneous “events” that themselves follow sets of performative scripts and reveal what we shall come to see as certain important spatial logistics… the traded insultes turn out to be an important aspect of the intersection of spatiality and spectatoriality endemic to Accra’s street life, such that the ultimate fact of seeing and being seen translates everything in the heated altercation into the display of the mastery of unstated yet critical cultural codes of rhetoric and delivery” (Quayson, 17). Quayson called upon the works of other urban theorists and social scientists to elevate his understanding of what he observed. He consolidated the prospect of social relations as integral to understanding space itself, because interacting with one another is a method by which humans employ active agency while simultaneously projecting their personal cultural and political make-up onto others in a social scenario. “The interpersonal interactions manifest different dimensions of economy, culture, and society and their transformations through time,” (Quayson, 21). A nation may be defined by territorial boundaries coupled with cultural identity and political history, yet Ghana as a nation and feelings of Ghanaian nationalism can be found on Oxford Street – alongside evidence of Ghana’s role within transnational schema as seen through the development and distribution of technology, goods and services, and marketing. Meaning, Oxford Street as a space is not necessarily globalization itself, but the interactions that occur via Oxford Street have certainly been shaped by and affected by it.

In terms of what makes Accra unique as a political space, Quayson observes evidence of politics manifested in the aforementioned interpersonal interactions. One’s understanding of their role within Oxford Street as a social space is also tied to the politics of the pace itself. “Although space gives the impression of being a mere container, its dimensions are in fact produced by what it contains, while it also (re)configures and (re)arranges the contained elements. Thus the built environment of roads, railways, and buildings as well as the bureaucratic apparatus that brings all these elements together instigates social relationships that are in turn progressively redefined as people interact with their build environment” (Quayson, 5). Within urban Africa, there exists a layered duality that has resulted from its distinct political history and sociocultural make up as it has developed over time. Politics is intrinsically at work as the infrastructure and organization of Ghana’s cities is controlled by “government agencies, urban planners, and multinational organizations “(Quayson, 5). Thus, comparing Ghana’s cities to its other districts or even slums, brings about a discussion as why stark discrepancies exists between these different kinds of spaces. After all, Nkrumah did push for Ghana’s development and globalization while focusing on urban areas and neglecting the nation’s agricultural spaces. Additionally, the name Oxford Street did come about as a symptom global capital interests, when this sect of Cantonments Road was given the moniker as exiles returned to Ghana from all over the world, and a large concentration came back from London (Quayson, 10).When politics shapes cities by way of policy interventions, Quayson sees this as sociocultural attitudes that manifest in politics and thereby shape interpersonal interactions going forward. Politics within Ghana’s urban spaces like Oxford Street can in a more grandiose fashion by observing and studying the infrastructure of the spaces themselves – as shaped by political history – or from a more localized scope, the presence of bureaucracy and nationalism evident from the interpersonal interactions of the masses that trek Oxford Street.

Works Cited