Mechanised Mining, Infrastructure, and the Evolution of Gold Coast’s Urban Space, c. 1900-1957

My research project takes an overarching inspiration from recent conceptual debates about planetary urbanisation, particularly the notion of extended urbanisation. Extended urbanisation has not only returned scholarly reflections about the ‘urban’ to the so-called urban question, but has provoked critical responses from urban theorists/researchers to the formulation of planetary urbanisation while inspiring insightful works relating to mining and politics. It is at the intersections of emergent debates that this paper is situated. By exploring the history of mechanised mining in Gold Coast, it (a) responds to calls to empirically ground the central claims under extended urbanisation; (b) deconstructs the dichotomy that persist in how histories of mining in the Gold Coast have been formally cast to represent mining districts as ‘tropical estates’ exploited by the distant/disconnected metropole (c) by reading urban space as simultaneously fragmented (physical geographies) with intimate links to global capital flows that facilitated industrial resource extraction in colonised territories; (d) reinterpret how infrastructure—meaning the medium and frame that—orient the capacities of unequal people to shape the processes and form of urban extension.