Slumdog Architects

We have arrived to Accra in search of a better economy, and have moved into the largest slum of the city. Now that our bulk luggages being stored around the city with our friends, we are free to live with the city as our living room, the market our source of daily bread. We only come home to sleep. It rained heavily the day before last, and we began perfecting our skills of gutter-jumping. Pants rolled up and ready to go, we are living in the heart of Accra. The rainy season is intensifying and there are malaria mosquitos everywhere. In the next few days Gabriela will attempt to get a job with the market queens of Agbogbloshi, while the boys focus on the more "manly" activities of bulk-breaking.

Old Fadama is strategically located in the city. The settlement lives with the Agbogbloshi market, however, the sellers from this area also operate around the entire city.

Mapping a slum is not easy. The settlement is extremely dense and home to about 100,000 people. We are hoping for a very high quality sattellitte image soon from Quickbird, and in the meantime using google earth, space syntax, and GPS to map the are.

We are also developing our character sketches and scenarios. Soon we will interview Jean-Jaque's mother and wife to Akokora from Wiaga. She is a migrant worker who has been residing in Accra for 3 years in hopes to find ties to our previous study.

Looking back on Old Fadama, Accra

This is our Architecture body report based on the observations inside Old Fadama, our primary site of focus in Accra. Its a compilation of the various materials used with basic details of construction techniques.

Street Connectivity and Traffic

Accra is urbanizing itself very rapidly, rippling upwards from the sea, especially along the major finger and ring roads. The invention of the automobile has led to sprawl. Housing shortages cause slums to fill in along restricted flood planes of rivers, exploding upwards with higher densities. 





We just acquired more information and plan to update the space syntax diagram accordingly.