Green Improvement Is Never Neutral: Epistemic Justice, Gentrification, Multispecies Public Space and Thermal Visibility (Mohtat, Anguelovski, Quinton, Droste, Fairbairn, Perrelet, Huang) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Ecological improvement is one of the most unstable categories in contemporary urbanism because every gain arrives inside a field already structured by property, governance, species, infrastructure and unequal exposure. A new park may increase thermal comfort and land value at the same time; a flood-adaptive landscape may reduce runoff while excluding the experiential knowledge of residents most exposed to flooding; a highly planted square may support some taxa while displacing others; a green retrofit may increase biodiversity while accelerating real-estate investment. The green city is therefore not a city in which environmental benefits accumulate linearly but one in which ecological consequences are redistributed. Quinton and Nesbitt’s review of green, environmental, ecological, climate, carbon and resilience gentrification is revealing precisely because the proliferation of terms points to a common political difficulty: sustainability agendas can participate in the production of space for progressively more affluent users even when their declared objectives are public benefit. Their classificatory proposal of “sustainability gentrification” exposes the structural continuity behind fragmented disciplinary vocabularies. 

The Ecological City Is an Argument: Green Space, Knowledge and Territorial Authority in Dakar, Kinshasa, Cairo, Tunis, Nairobi and Cape Town (Cissé, Mvemba, Aly, Ben Salem, Odhengo, Stålhammar) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

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. 

Theory from Irreducible Cities: African Urban Epistemology, Comparison and Situated Knowledge (Watson, Pieterse, Robinson, Anderson, Okyere, Simwanda, Odendaal) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

A city becomes theoretically consequential when it is permitted to contradict the concepts through which it is first observed. The enduring asymmetry of urban studies has not been simply that African cities were underrepresented, but that they were frequently positioned as empirical deviations from theories generated elsewhere: sites of informality, infrastructural deficit, incomplete modernity or delayed development whose explanatory grammar arrived in advance. Vanessa Watson’s “clash of rationalities” makes the epistemic structure of this problem visible. Planning systems built from techno-managerial, marketised and often inherited institutional forms encounter populations whose livelihoods, spatial practices and survival strategies operate through different rationalities; the resulting conflict cannot be understood as a temporary failure to implement an otherwise universal planning model.