Vernacular Architecture and Grassroots Urban Politics: How Political Ties are Embedded in Residential Design with Noah Nathan
Noah Nathan is an associate professor of political science at MIT and a faculty associate at MIT’s Global Diversity Lab. His work focuses on electoral politics, political economy, and urban politics in Africa.
Abstract
The physical structures in which urban life occurs are an underappreciated determinant of how grassroots urban politics unfolds. In many rapidly growing cities, housing scarcity forces residents into multifamily buildings that create daily exposure to neighbors. We argue that these exposures affect political behavior by shaping residents’ access to political information, integration into political networks, and capacity for collective action. We focus on the informal, vernacular architecture of West Africa’s dominant urban housing form—the compound house. Compound house residents in urban Ghana participate more in politics than similar residents of other housing types. Leveraging an original survey, including novel measures of tenants’ spatial network centrality within their residential buildings, we suggest that key mechanisms for this relationship emerge from the effects of architectural design on visibility and social ties among co-tenants. Ultimately, built environments must be studied alongside demographic environments to best understand contextual effects on political behavior.
Co-sponsored by the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, the Georgia Tech Global Development Program, and the School of City and Regional Planning.