Mobile Work: Handcart and Bicycle Workers Across the Urban Economy of Greater Accra Region

ABSTRACT This article examines the everyday labour of handcart and bicycle workers in Accra and Tema, showing how their activities constitute a form of relational infrastructure in the urban economy of Ghana's Greater Accra Region. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork based on interviews, direct observation and photographic documentation, the study highlights how workers improvise repairs, adjust routes to shifting rhythms of demand and rely on dense networks of trust and reciprocity. Their practices link household production, street‐level consumption and small‐scale recycling chains, sustaining circulation in contexts marked by uneven infrastructure and low capitalisation. Through the combined lens of AbdouMaliq Simone's people as infrastructure and Milton Santos's theory of urban economic circuits, the analysis shows that these workers operate not at the margins but as key connectors of goods, materials and information. Their mobility, bodily endurance and inventive responses to uncertainty reveal how ordinary actors make Ghanaian cities function on a daily basis.