Housing Development, Local Land Conflicts and Sustainable Land-use Planning in Peri-urban Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines the various ways local land conflicts affect sustainable land-use planning in peri-urban Ghana. In recent years, rapid urbanisation has resulted a high demand for customary lands for housing development in peri-urban areas in Ghana. Customary lands are continuously converted into housing uses; leading to eviction of indigenes from their farmlands. A mixed method approach was used to collect data from 40 participants from the research site, Aburaso. Purposive sampling technique was used to sample nine key informants while simple random sampling technique was employed to gather thirty-one individual household developers. The study found that dispossession of indigenes and poor accountability on the part of chiefs create contestations within royal family; land conflicts between chiefs and other clans in communities. The ultimate results are violence, death, poor land allocation and poor land-use planning with houses lacking portable water, proper sanitation and good access to roads.