Experimental afterlives : making and unmaking developmental laboratories in Ghana.

ly this absence is understood in terms of ‘development’, ‘modernity’, ‘progress’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘urbanisation.’ More concretely such ideas are literalised in various aspects of the built environment. Buildings in poor repair are described as ‘ramshackle’ and ‘uncivilised’. The ‘temporary’ nature of makeshift kitchens and bathrooms, fashioned from ‘swish’ and corrugated iron is similarly highlighted as evidence of a gap between vision and reality. More generally, the ‘bushy’, ‘weedy’ and ‘chaotic’ nature of the town are imagined as evidence of ‘backwardness’ and ‘under-development’, that highlights the failed promises that attended resettlement. Such discourses evoke an understanding of ruination and decay that is partly elicited by the material remains of these infrastructures but which do not deterministically arise from these (Stoler 2008; Edensor 2012; Johnson 2013; Schwenkel 2013). Rather these relate to an ontology that enlists archetypes of the modern and the urban, and as the flip side of these visions sees the environment to hand in terms of a relative deficit of those attributes. The physical remains of the resettlement project emerge in shifting disjunction with the ideological remains of visions that originally sustained it. Walking round the resettlement township of Senchi with one of the town elders, he pointed out a core house that was being undercut by heavy erosion, causing it to sag heavily on one