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. 

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.