Landlords and Lodgers

“Landlords and Lodgers presents a valuable study of the interconnectedness between the built environment, social practices, and changing identity. Pellow’s intimate familiarity with the setting, history, and people of Sabon Zongo has enabled her to produce a rare urban ethnography that does justice to the macro structure and functions of the city without losing sight of the individual actors who inhabit and reproduce Accra’s physicality and meaning. . . . This book should be a welcome addition to undergraduate and graduate course reading lists in the anthropology of space and place, West Afdrican ethnography, and urban planning.”

“This richly observed and lovingly constructed portrait of a distinctive community will be of interest to spatially informed scholars of religion, immigration, minority communities, and gender.”

“Pellow describes in a vivid and compelling way the distinctiveness of the Sabon Zongo. . . . She manages to convince the reader that the architectural space is conducive for particular forms of social and commercial encounters.”

“This theoretically informed, well-researched, and closely written book should be quite useful in middle- and upper-level urban geography classes as well as in African geography classes as a fine case study of urban sense of place in a unique, yet in some ways emblematic, West African neighborhood.”