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.