Oiling the Urban Economy

This book presents a critical analysis of the ’resource curse’ doctrine and a review of the international evidence on oil and urban development to examine the role of oil on property development and rights in West Africa’s new oil metropolis - Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana. This author shows how institutions of varying degrees of power interact to govern land, housing, and labour in the city, and analyses how efficient, sustainable, and equitable are the outcomes of these interactions. It is a comprehensive account of the tensions and contradictions in the main sectors of the urban economy, society, and environment in the booming Oil City and will be of interest to urban economists, development economists, real estate economists, Africanists and urbanists.