Work record / Development / Ghana Community

Ghana, 1,000 acres: the master plan began as an economy

A developer asked for schematic design on a city-sized site in Ghana. I made who pays and who builds the first question, ahead of any street layout.

The seat

I was principal on the Common Ground team for this pursuit, April to June 2026. The developer came to LÏEF Development, and the work ran through LÏEF.

What I was brought in to decide

LÏEF Development was handed a program for a new community by a developer. The land is about 1,000 acres in the Volta Region of Ghana, an hour and a half or so east of Accra, up against the Akwapim-Togo range. The idea began as a taxi-union app with EV charging. It turned into an EV factory with battery plants, then into a city as the land got bigger.

The program amounted to a town: markets, civic buildings and a stadium, a university and a hospital, four EV factories, a 100-home luxury enclave and 1,500 detached homes. The request itself was for schematic design. The site floods in the rainy season and sits on laterite soils with termites. It also relies on a local grid the developer did not trust.

Two earlier Ghanaian plans show the contrast. Hope City, announced near Accra in 2013 on the back of a striking rendering, was never built. Akosombo Township was laid out in the 1960s together with the dam, around a real economic anchor, and it still functions in those hills.

What we did

• The full Common Ground team worked this through LÏEF. I sat as principal, checking each design decision against constructability, budget, phasing and the pro forma, and I carried the bidding and construction phases.
• I treated the request as a development problem before a design problem. On the kickoff call, the developer's team said local wages run about $7,000 a year for an accountant, while the best homes in Accra sell for as much as $3 million. Most buyers of the standard homes cannot pay what enclave buyers can. That meant the plan had to answer two things before any picture: who pays for roads, water, power and treatment, and who builds the homes.
• We converted the program list into a site structure. There are six development zones laid out on a grid, A to F, with a first land-use allocation across twelve uses. Streets run in three tiers, arterial, collector and local, with utility corridors, green-belt separation and cycle and pedestrian links. Phase 1 named what a client can hold us to. The list covers the master site plan and enlarged zone plans, then massing studies, then prototype floor plans for standard homes and for luxury homes. Add density and parking analysis, the open-space plan, infrastructure corridors, and an investor- and regulator-ready design narrative.
• I recommended SABS, a three-layer composite panel system. It has no organic material for termites to eat and nothing for mold to grow on, it carries wind and seismic ratings, and it lowers cooling load under an equatorial sun. I knew how it behaves on a job because I ran the bid desk on SABS panel work in the Xtrata seat. I also knew from leading the rebuild of Greensburg, Kansas, that a place gets built once somebody has solved who pays and who builds. We put on-site training for local crews, covering fabrication, installation and finish, with quality oversight through construction, inside the design scope. The build then leaves trained trades behind, where imported crews would leave nothing.
• We ended the proposal with fifteen questions the plan cannot honestly be drawn without. They cover site shape, soils, income profiles by housing type, energy strategy, cooking fuel, governing codes, how big the stadium is, and the security and governance model.
• On the kickoff call the developer's own architect came up, along with the flood risk and a concern that too big a share of the fee would be due before the working relationship had shown its worth. I re-scoped our role to the seats nobody else held: master planner, storyteller, and the layer that makes the system buildable, working beside the architect. I tied the fee to smaller milestones, each linked to a deliverable. The call also brought new items: cycle lanes, bus rapid transit on the Bogotá TransMilenio model, a solar field, treatment of water and waste on site, and maybe a panel or brick factory there. That widened our training offer from installation to fabrication.
• Two days after the call we delivered a concept direction rooted in the place, drawing on Accra's colonial, independence-era and contemporary layers and the Ewe vernacular of the Volta. It had an eight-color palette taken from local sources: Laterite Red and Kaolin White, West African Indigo and Kente Gold, Adinkra Charcoal and Harmattan Ochre, Volta Verdigris and Ewe Earth Brown. Adinkra symbols served as wayfinding. A transit spine ran from industry through the civic core to the homes. The story for the city had four beats. It is built by Ghanaian hands. It is rooted in climate and culture. It is one city for everyone in it. And it has a real economic anchor.
• We wrote a finish playbook so the panels would look Ghanaian, not imported. Civic buildings get hand-trowelled lime plaster in laterite red and homes get kaolin white. A laterite block plinth about 600 mm high protects against rainy-season splash. Breeze-block screens go on west walls, zinc roofs float above the shell like parasols, east and west overhangs run deep, doors are indigo, and every roof carries solar. The playbook also listed the failure modes to engineer around: keep the foam core out of the sun, schedule panel work for the dry season, raise plinths on lots that flood, and detail joints against termites.
• The story leans on one claim, that the enclave helps carry the homes around it, so we modeled it. The one case that closes pairs the high enclave with low infrastructure. Every other pairing still lacks a named source of money. I call that line a hypothesis, and the fifteen questions exist to swap modeled inputs for real ones.

Results

• A Phase 1 proposal for the full site, with the build system and a local workforce plan written into the design scope.
• A concept direction in the developer's hands two days after the kickoff call.
• The proposal remains unsigned.
• My takeaway is that I would now start with the concept direction, not whole-site schematic design with half the fee due at the outset. Next time I pursue a master plan, the first paid step will be the concept direction, with the schematic proposal after it.

The lesson

Settle who pays and who builds before anyone draws how it looks.

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Ghana Community on the Common Ground wiki.

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