"A Room in the City, a House in the Village": The Double Life of Migrants and Urban Housing

The dual life of migrants creates challenges for urban housing governance. Many migrants limit investment in decent urban housing, opting to live in vulnerable or sub-standard structures. While the resulting housing outcome in the city may be seen as a failure of aspiration, it should rather be understood as a strategic sacrifice shaped by failures in urban housing governance.

Across the world, the story of migration is often told with a lot of nuances missed. A rural migrant’s success is usually measured by how quickly they leave their past behind and settle permanently in a new city. This traditional model suggests that as people move from rural areas to urban centers, they should slowly climb a lifestyle ladder that leads to full integration into the flashy urban life.

However, this perspective misses a crucial reality for millions of people. In Africa, migration is rarely a definitive break from home. Instead, it is a circular journey defined by deep, multi-local ties. For many migrants (if not anyone, myself), life is lived in two places at once.

For migrants living in cities such as Kumasi, home is not merely one fixed point on a map. It is a complicated balance between the urban streets where they work and the rural villages where they truly belong.

A recent study by Daniel Kwame Blija and his colleagues at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology examined 71 people who travelled from Nkoranza South (a small town) to Kumasi (a city) to understand how they manage their lives across these two locations. The researchers found not a story of people abandoning their roots, but a narrative of intense, daily connection. These migrants stay deeply connected to their origins. On average, they call their families back home 40 times every month. This ongoing communication is supported by a clear financial commitment. Almost everyone in the study remits money to the village, averaging GHC 350 per month to purchase food, clothing, or farm supplies. For many, the bond is even stronger. Through groups and associations, they pool their savings to fund developmental projects such as the construction of a rural health clinic, demonstrating that their resources remain firmly rooted in their home soil.  

The Strategic Sacrifice of Urban Housing

Because their focus remains on the village (small town), their life in the city is often defined by purposeful sacrifice. We call this choice strategic immobility or translocal housing fixity. It is a deliberate decision to remain in a single reserved place in the city while building a mansion “home” in the village.

In the paper, Isaac’s narrative, as a respondent, illustrates this perfectly. He arrived in Kumasi for university with just a bag and initially shared a small, crowded room with his aunt and her three children. Even after he secured a job and moved into a rented flat, his focus remained on his roots. He and his siblings used their savings to improve their family home in the village.

For many, this journey begins by perching with a relative to save money, even if it means having no privacy. As they begin earning, they may move into their own rented building, but they are often one financial shock away from moving back in with family. For market workers and drivers, the goal is rarely to own an expensive urban home. Instead, they often spend years living in compound houses, which account for about 71.8% of migrant housing in Kumasi.

This behavior mirrors a broader global pattern known as affective rationality. This is a process where migrants do not separate their emotions from their financial logic. Instead, they use their feelings for home as a rational guide to manage risks. Whether a migrant is in Kumasi or living in the international diaspora in London or New York, the logic is the same.

People live a simple, inexpensive life in the host city to ensure they have enough resources to maintain an emotional and structural anchor back home.

This house in the village serves as a source of pride and accomplishment, an insurance policy against an unpredictable future, and a mechanism for preserving identity and social standing.

Policy implications for urban governance and risk management

The translocal logic of migrant housing should not be mistaken for a lack of urban ambition. Most migrants would welcome stable housing, safer neighborhoods, and a fuller urban life. The problem is not aspiration, but feasibility under conditions of income volatility, high urban rents, and persistent obligations to family and kin in rural areas. The urban dream exists, but it is postponed and strategically managed.

This has direct implications for urban governance, particularly in flood risk management and housing policy. When migrants face a choice between investing in long-term urban housing and fulfilling social and financial commitments at home, the latter often takes priority. As a result, migrants rationally limit investment in urban housing quality and location, remaining in rental compounds or low-cost areas that are more exposed to flooding and environmental risk.

This creates a structural mismatch between policy assumptions and lived realities. Urban policies often assume a linear transition toward permanent settlement and ownership, and design incentives around upgrading, tenure security, or relocation. For many migrants, these incentives are not ignored because they are undesirable, but because they are incompatible with current economic realities. Urban vulnerability, therefore, is not only a technical problem of drainage or land use, but also a consequence of constrained choice within a translocal livelihood strategy.

Policy responses need to reflect this nuance. Rather than framing migrant housing outcomes as a failure of aspiration, urban interventions should lower the cost of pursuing the urban dream. This includes improving the safety and resilience of rental housing, enforcing minimum standards in compound houses, and investing in flood protection that benefits mobile and renter populations. In doing so, cities can reduce risk without requiring migrants to abandon their translocal commitments.

Conclusion

This dual life of migrants creates challenges for urban management. The American dream of the migrant has not disappeared but rather deferred, negotiated, and stretched across space. For many migrants, making a life in the city is a genuine aspiration, but one that must be balanced against immediate survival and long-term security rooted in the village.

Understanding migration through this lens changes how we interpret urban outcomes. Having a room in the city and a house in the village is not a rejection of urban life. It is a rational response to uncertainty, high costs, and uneven opportunity. Urban policy that recognizes this reality can better support migrants in gradually turning aspiration into durable urban belonging, a home, rather than a temporary dwelling, which heightens urban vulnerability.

DISCLAIMER: This blog is based on the research article “A Room in the City, a House in the Village: The Translocal Logic of Migrant Housing in Ghana” by Blija et al. (2025). The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the original authors or any institution with which theyare affiliated.