Open Markets in Ghana and Covid-19 interventions. Competing strategies of infection control and lessons for relational urban health

• Applicant: Dr. Henning Füller
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2021 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468356683

Open markets are often of vital importance in African cities as assets especially for vulnerable groups. Markets are not only a source of livelihood and goods but often provide several essential social functions, income and participation. Markets in this regard do play an important role for public health provision. At the same time, those markets have been articulated as public health threats for some time and been targeted with hygiene regulations, restructuring and decongestion efforts, often heavily contested. In the current Covid-19 pandemic, markets have been especially singled out for infection control interventions in many African cities. Open markets are therefore concrete sites where top-down policies of securitizing Public Health and bottom-up strategies of livelihood and social resilience are worked out in a conflictive way. The often unacknowledged effects and implications of the current interventions are especially severe given the vital functions of markets.The project engages with an immediate assessment of the implications of Covid-19 interventions at the two largest open markets in Ghana using qualitative methods. Orienting is a relational understanding of health that is explicitly aware of social, structural and place-based determinants. With this perspective, implications and effects of the current intervention become better understood. The findings help to reorient infection-control policies in a socially less harmful way. The empirical case study further allows to detail a conceptual contribution for approaching health in critical urban studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Ghana
• International Co-Applicant: Lewis Abedi Asante, Ph.D.