Urban nature becomes politically real only through the systems that make it visible, valuable and governable. A tree canopy captured by satellite, a market garden defended by cultivators, a colonial square conserved as landscape heritage, a park rendered inaccessible by a flyover, a Medina courtyard retained as climatic memory and a biodiversity hotspot disputed by planners are all called “green”, yet they belong to profoundly different epistemic and territorial orders. The African urban cases assembled here make this distinction unavoidable. Cissé and colleagues quantify Dakar’s green-space decline between 1990 and 2022, demonstrating a conversion from vegetated land toward built and bare surfaces; Badiane, Thiaw and Deme complicate the same city by showing that particular green spaces persist as colonial and postcolonial civic inheritances whose value cannot be inferred from land-cover percentage.
List moves to Pikine, where urban farmland is not simply disappearing beneath development but is actively contested through coalitions that determine who may use, exchange and transform territory. Kinshasa produces an even more explicit overlap between ecology and authority. Sambieni and colleagues inventory 87 urban and peri-urban green spaces as differentiated ecological and managerial objects, while Wagemakers, Makangu Diki and De Herdt trace the governance of the Mokali market-gardening site through vegetable growers, customary leaders, cooperatives and state actors. Their work dismantles the assumption that environmental governance is located inside a singular public institution: land is governed through legal plurality, social legitimacy, historical claims and everyday negotiations. Mvemba and colleagues add a second epistemic layer by asking the Kinois themselves what they know about urban green-space loss. Their 2026 survey records that more than half of planned green space in the four sampled communes has been destroyed or occupied, but the significance of the study exceeds the percentage. Residents become recognised as producers of environmental evidence. Cairo reveals the inverse problem: Aly and Dimitrijevic show that the city lacks a coherent public geographical database because green-space information is fragmented among agencies, making informational infrastructure part of the ecological deficit itself. Mohamed, Kronenberg and Łaszkiewicz then demonstrate that environmental provision is relational: forty of fifty-seven Greater Cairo parks became less accessible after transport-network transformations even though the parks did not necessarily disappear. A highway can therefore reduce green infrastructure without occupying green land; it changes the topology through which residents reach it. Tunis discloses a longer temporal register. Ben Salem and colleagues reconstruct Medina greenery as an inherited system of gardens, palms, courtyards, orchards and vegetal meanings embedded in Islamic urban morphology, then ask how contemporary green infrastructure can be introduced without treating the historical core as an empty surface for generic sustainability devices. Nairobi shifts the question toward use and socio-economic valuation. Odhengo and colleagues connect green-space quality to wellbeing, social cohesion, access, maintenance, safety and residents’ willingness to support enhancement, showing that ecological infrastructure only becomes socially effective through repeated and trusted use. Cape Town finally makes the category itself unstable: Stålhammar’s practitioners disagree over what biodiversity should mean in a city that is simultaneously a global hotspot and a profoundly unequal urban territory. Conservation priorities, ecosystem services and citizens’ preferences do not automatically converge. Green infrastructure is therefore not a consensual object waiting to be optimised. It is an argument over which nature is being protected, for whom, by what institution, according to which evidence and at what spatial scale.
A comparative ecological archive must consequently preserve the conditions under which “green” acquires meaning rather than treating green space as a universal node. The city packs become valuable precisely because they prevent the graph from performing the epistemic violence of effortless equivalence. Dakar’s 9.54% green-space coverage in 2022 can be related to Cairo’s declining public greenery, but the relation must retain the distinct sensing systems, administrative categories and urban histories from which those observations are produced. Kinshasa’s resident testimony can connect to Nairobi’s user valuation, but one documents destruction and land pressure while the other examines use, perception and economic contribution. Tunis’s green heritage can relate to Dakar’s inherited landscape spaces without implying identical colonial histories or morphological structures. Cape Town’s biodiversity conflicts can inform Kinshasa’s ecological inventory while preserving the difference between a globally exceptional biodiversity hotspot and a rapidly expanding Central African metropolis. This is where the knowledge graph becomes method rather than storage. Each source should carry at least five active dimensions: the spatial object observed, the method through which it becomes visible, the authority able to act upon it, the population or species affected, and the temporal regime within which change is judged. Such indexing would allow apparently incompatible evidence—Landsat classification, ethnography, surveys, historical landscape reading, network analysis, interviews, field inventories—to coexist without being flattened into a hierarchy of methodological legitimacy. It would also expose absences. Cairo’s missing database becomes a node because absence of organised information constrains governance; the loss of Kinshasa’s market-garden documents after the 1990s pillages becomes infrastructurally meaningful because records, irrigation systems and cooperative authority disappear together; the lack of green zoning inside the Tunis Medina becomes legible as a planning distinction rather than merely an environmental shortfall. Knowledge infrastructure and ecological infrastructure repeatedly fold into one another. The archive can therefore map not only where nature exists but how claims about nature circulate: from resident perception to municipal policy, from satellite pixel to conservation boundary, from historical garden to design guideline, from market-garden conflict to land authority, from street network to park accessibility. This model directly strengthens Socioplastics because it turns non-homogenisation into an operational discipline. The comparative field does not seek a single African urban ecological condition. It creates enough relational precision for Dakar, Kinshasa, Cairo, Tunis, Nairobi and Cape Town to modify one another conceptually while remaining scientifically irreducible. An ecological city is not one in which greenery has been maximised; it is one whose environmental relations can be traced across matter, memory, authority, access, evidence and use without collapsing them into one measure. Within Socioplastics, this constellation condenses as RegimeMutation.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher whose work connects urbanism, ecological infrastructure, spatial epistemology and public knowledge systems through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
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