The Relationship Between Religious Centers and Urban Development: Evidence from Ghana

A large number of churches and mosques have been recently established in Ghana. Local policymakers and foreign philanthropists politically and financially support establishing these houses of worship due to their assumption regarding a causal relationship between religious centers and neighborhood development. The current study aims to test whether the assumption regarding a causal link holds by extracting and analyzing features from satellite images and conducting a spatial clustering analysis. The results indicate that religious centers are more likely to be constructed in fast-growing neighborhoods with certain characteristics. However, there are no signs of them changing temporal trends in urban development. Religious centers are more likely to be established in middle-class neighborhoods with high population density and above-average rates of illiteracy and unemployment. In addition to testing the mentioned assumption, the results shed some light on the influence of demand-and-supply factors versus socioeconomic and accessibility variables on the spatial distribution of religious centers.