Building in Accra: The City That Refuses to Finish

Every city has its signature architectural feature. Paris has its Haussmann boulevards. New York has its water towers. Accra has its unfinished buildings.

They are everywhere: concrete columns rising from foundations that were poured years ago, rebar reaching toward a sky that the building has not yet reached. Some have been standing for decades. Some have families living in their lower floors while the upper floors wait for money that may never come. Some are being actively built, one bag of cement at a time, by families who are constructing their futures literally, brick by brick.

Architects and urban planners have long viewed these structures as problems to be solved. But a growing number of thinkers are arguing that they are something else entirely: a form of architecture that is perfectly adapted to the economic realities of a city where most people build incrementally, adding rooms as children are born and money allows.