Every time it rains: navigating everyday flood hazards and mobility disruptions in Accra’s periphery

This paper investigates the impacts of flooding on urban mobilities in the context of rapid urban expansion and unregulated residential sprawl. The paper draws on mixed-methods research conducted in 2019–2022 in peripheral neighbourhoods of Accra, Ghana. The study highlights that flooding is an everyday hazard, which causes widespread disruptions to urban mobilities and everyday activities of residents in peripheral neighbourhoods. A typology is proposed to capture the diverse embodied experiences, social meanings, and material practices of movement (or lack thereof) associated with flood-induced mobility disruptions. The typology distinguishes between delayed mobility, postponed mobility, immobility, pre-emptive mobility, and persistent mobility. The research illuminates that people’s experiences of and capacities to navigate mobility disruptions are socially differentiated and influenced by livelihood situations, care responsibilities, gender, life course dynamics, and physical abilities. Overall, the research draws attention to everyday flood hazards as an additional and mutually reinforcing factor shaping experiences of constrained mobilities and immobilities in urban peripheries and calls for a more robust recognition of mobilities in policy and planning for flood risk mitigation in cities of the Global South.