METROPOLITAN NATURE IS NOT GREEN SPACE: HEAT, ACCESS, GOVERNANCE AND WET COASTAL URBANISM IN LAGOS, CAPE TOWN, ADDIS ABABA AND TUNIS · LAPIEZA LAB · ANTO LLOVERAS · SOCIOPLASTICS · 2026

Metropolitan nature becomes analytically useful when it stops functioning as a generic synonym for green space and begins to reveal the unequal spatial systems through which climate, access, governance and ecological form are produced. The four studies assembled here—Lagos, Cape Town, Addis Ababa and Tunis—describe very different metropolitan conditions, yet together they demonstrate why urban nature cannot be understood through quantity alone. 

THE EUROPEAN CITY DOES NOT HAVE ONE NATURE: THERMAL FIELDS, ECOLOGICAL SCALES, HEALTH EFFECTS AND PLANNING DEVICES IN MADRID, ROME, PARIS, BERLIN, LONDON AND OSLO · LAPIEZA LAB · ANTO LLOVERAS · SOCIOPLASTICS · 2026

European metropolitan nature becomes legible only when the category “green space” is broken into the spatial, ecological, social and institutional relations that make environmental capacity operative. The ten studies assembled across Madrid, Rome, Paris, Berlin, London and Oslo do not converge on a universal green metric; they progressively dismantle one. Madrid first shows that landscape performance exceeds cadastral boundaries. Aram and colleagues measure the cooling influence of a 125-hectare urban park through mobile observations and perceived thermal comfort, demonstrating that distance from the park is associated with changes in air temperature, physiological equivalent temperature and bodily perception. The park is therefore a thermal field rather than an isolated polygon. 

A Geology of Urban Permanence does not emerge from a vacuum, nor does it seek shelter in a single disciplinary home. Its intellectual architecture is best understood as a field of tangencies—points of contact, lines of affinity, and zones of productive friction with existing traditions. To map these tangencies is not to reduce the work to its influences, but to demonstrate its relational capacity: the way it enters into dialogue with multiple lineages while maintaining its own conceptual coherence.

This topography is organized in registers: the authors who function as structural pillars, the fields of knowledge that provide operative protocols, and the institutional contexts where these conversations find resonance.