Building Belonging: Place‐Making Practices of Ghanaian Returnees in Accra's Creative Industries

ABSTRACT This study examines how Ghanaian returnees in Accra's creative industries cultivate belonging through the creation of cultural venues. While return‐migration scholarship has largely emphasised returnees' psychic ‘in‐betweenness’ and cultivation of symbolic ‘third spaces’, this study explores the material and spatial practices through which belonging is anchored. Drawing on 6 months of qualitative fieldwork, it analyses three returnee‐owned venues—a concept store, a performance space and a subscription library—to show how place‐making shapes belonging through the spatial settings, material configurations and meanings attached to these venues. The findings reveal a clear paradox: while these venues offer returnees refuge, community and cultural agency, they simultaneously reproduce socio‐spatial boundaries, ultimately constraining their own pursuit of belonging. Place‐making emerges as an ambivalent practice that both grounds returnees and reinforces wider urban inequalities. The study advances return migration scholarship by foregrounding the spatial politics through which belonging is constructed in a postcolonial urban context.