In this guest post, Dr Michael Gameli Dziwornu reflects on the research ‘Festivalising the postcolony: architecture, leisure, and political economy in West African urban carnivals’, funded by an International Fellowship from the Urban Studies Foundation and developed at the University of Manchester (UK), under the mentorship of Professor Stephen Walker.
How a USF International Fellowship helped me trace the relationships between celebration, public space, and urban life in Accra and Lagos.
A queue outside a concert venue can seem like a small detail in a much larger event. Yet as people wait, wristbands are checked, barriers direct movement and security staff decide who can enter, the queue begins to shape the city around it. It organises access, labour, and movement. For a few hours, it becomes part of the urban infrastructure of celebration.
One question kept returning to me during my USF International Fellowship. What can we learn about cities by taking their festivals seriously? West Africa’s December festival season, often called ‘Detty December’, is usually described through entertainment, tourism, and celebration. My research asks what else is happening when concerts, street events, and gatherings reshape urban space. Who gets access? Who does the work? How do platforms, security, and investment shape the experience of the city?
From January to September 2026, I was based in the Department of Architecture at the University of Manchester, mentored by Professor Stephen Walker. The Fellowship gave me protected time to return to my fieldwork and develop its arguments, time I had struggled to find alongside my role at Council for Scientific and Industrial Research–Institute for Scientific and Technological Information (CSIR-INSTI) in Accra.
The project, Festivalising the postcolony: architecture, leisure, and political economy in West African urban carnivals, grew from research in Accra, Lagos, and Kwahu. Between 2024 and 2026, my team and I followed concerts, street festivals, durbars, and paragliding events through observation, spatial mapping, photography, questionnaires, and interviews. We spoke with organisers, vendors, drivers, residents, ticketing-platform representatives, police officers, and municipal officials.
What festivals reveal about the city
One conversation at Labadi Beach in Accra captures much of what this research is about. A young vendor helping at a family drinks stall told us that December left no time for rest, because the stall had to be ready to serve at almost any hour. The stall did not host parties. Instead, waiters from the bars behind it bought drinks there cheaply and resold them to customers at a mark-up. Getting in was its own negotiation. Workers carried a card to pass the gate, and anyone without one either knew someone who could speak for them or paid. Even customers could not simply walk in. In a few sentences, the vendor described a festive economy organised through gates, informal fees, and layers of resale, with most of the margin captured further along the chain.
Following festivals across Accra, Lagos, and Kwahu showed me that they are more than events temporarily occupying an unchanged city. They depend on routes, venues, ticketing systems, transport, barriers, and networks of workers. These arrangements make celebration possible, while also determining who participates and on what terms. Festivals bring questions of leisure into contact with the everyday politics of public space, safety, and work.
From fieldwork to writing
During the Fellowship, I developed five manuscripts from this research. They examine how carnival circuits reshape public space and urban rights; how digital platforms distribute visibility and access; how festive economies organise security unevenly; how queues, wristbands, and barriers function as temporary access infrastructure; and how seasonal work distributes income, risk, and uncertainty. The papers have been submitted to journals or special issues for consideration.
One idea from this work is what I call a ‘visibility tax’. It describes the money, time, and effort that vendors, drivers, promoters, artists, and small hoteliers spend to remain noticeable in a festival economy increasingly mediated by social media, ticketing apps, and ride-hailing platforms. These costs fall unevenly, and they attach to places as well as people. Whole districts and seasonal calendars become valuable because they circulate online, and those who cannot keep up with that circulation risk being left at the margins of the festive city.
A festival can be a cultural event, a commercial opportunity, and a temporary spatial arrangement at once. It can open new forms of leisure while intensifying inequalities in access, safety, and working conditions. Studying these relations together helps us understand how urban life is made, and whose needs and interests are built into it.
The Fellowship also gave me opportunities to share and test the research. In June, I presented the project at the Manchester Architecture Research Group seminar. The discussion encouraged me to treat temporary arrangements such as queues, barriers, and wristbands as part of urban architecture rather than as background to it.
I also wrote for a wider audience about Ghana’s Kwahu Easter paragliding festival. In a feature for the Ghana News Agency, I described how a mountain ridge becomes a seasonal city as visitors, businesses, and events gather there. The piece explored how festivals reshape local economies and infrastructure.
Conversations with Professor Walker and Dr Tom Gillespie of Manchester’s Global Development Institute helped me sharpen the arguments and distinguish the contributions of each paper. I arrived with substantial fieldwork and connected questions. I left with a clearer research programme and greater confidence in communicating its ideas.
I am grateful to the Urban Studies Foundation for supporting this work through a USF International Fellowship, and to Professor Walker, Dr Gillespie, and colleagues at Manchester for their guidance. The Fellowship gave me time and an intellectual setting to turn fieldwork into a body of writing. It also strengthened my conviction that African festivals are not peripheral to urban studies. They are places from which we can develop new ways of understanding how cities work.