From state-led tourism to real estate investment: Remaking Accra’s speculative urban frontier

This article examines how Ghana’s 2019 Year of Return tourism initiative functions as a state-led investment strategy that has reshaped Accra’s housing landscape. It analyzes how the government leveraged heritage tourism and diasporic connections to position Accra as a frontier for transnational real estate investment. Through geospatial and quantitative analysis of housing development patterns, complemented by document analysis and stakeholder interviews, this study conceptualizes state-led, tourism-driven speculative urbanism as a process in which tourism policy restructures urban housing markets. The findings show that, since 2019, short-term rental (STR) developments have proliferated across the city and are more than 500% as likely to be developed as other housing typologies. STRs emerged as the key mechanism translating tourism demand into speculative urban development. State policy, selective infrastructure provision, and real estate developers capitalizing on the initiative facilitated this shift by repositioning housing as a speculative asset. The resulting transformation has intensified housing unaffordability and redirected urban development toward transnational capital accumulation. This study shows how heritage tourism reorganizes urban space and contributes to debates on speculative urbanism and housing inequality in urbanizing cities in the Global South.