| 1. |
- Anderson, Pippin, et al.
(författare)
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Post-apartheid ecologies in the City of Cape Town : An examination of plant functional traits in relation to urban gradients
- 2020
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Ingår i: Landscape and Urban Planning. - : Elsevier. - 0169-2046 .- 1872-6062. ; 193, s. 1-10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this study we explore species richness and traits across two urban gradients in the City of Cape Town. The first is the natural-urban boundary and the second is a socio-economic gradient informed by historical race-based apartheid planning. Plant species and cover were recorded in 156 plots sampled from conservation areas, private gardens, and public open green space. The socio-economic gradient transitioned from wealthier, predominantly white neighbourhoods to poorer, pre- dominantly black neighbourhoods. The socio-economic gradient was selected to fall within one original vegetation type to ensure a consistent biophysical template. There is a marked shift between the natural and urban plant communities in the City of Cape Town, with little structural affinity. Urban landscapes are dominated by grass, with low diversity compared to natural counterparts. A significant ecological gradient of reduced biodiversity, traits, and in turn functionality, was found across the socio-economic gradient. Wealthier communities benefit from more private green space, more public green space, and a greater plant diversity. Poorer communities have limited green space on all fronts, and lower plant and trait diversity. Plant communities with limited diversity are less resilient and if exposed to environmental perturbation would lose species, and associated ecosystem services faster than a species rich community. These species-poor plant communities mirror historical apartheid planning that is resistant to change. Based on how biodiversity, functionality, and associated ecosystem services and ecosystem stability are linked, the results of this study suggests how significant environmental injustice persists in the City of Cape Town.
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| 2. |
- Cardoso, Ricardo, et al.
(författare)
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BLOCOS URBANISM : Capitalism and Modularity in the Making of Contemporary Luanda
- 2023
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Ingår i: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. - : Wiley. - 0309-1317 .- 1468-2427. ; 47:5, s. 809-832
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this article we portray and unpack the fabric of urban expansion in contemporary Luanda. In doing so, we examine interdependencies and complementarities between the organization of oil extraction off the coast of Angola, the emergence of particular modalities of modernist city planning for the expansion of its capital city, and the proliferation of cement blocks in the making of new urban forms throughout its burgeoning peripheries. By showing how urban development has unfolded through the interconnected realization of multiple kinds of systematizing blocks—namely oil blocks, city blocks and cement blocks—we analyse key material components in the production of new markets and urban spaces in the Angolan capital. By tracing forms of capitalism and modularity in the making of contemporary Luanda, we develop the concept of blocos urbanism to draw attention to modes of standardization and the production of legibility in contemporary processes of urbanization. Through this study, we aim to contribute to the conceptual apparatus for deciphering our global urban condition.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Towards situated histories of heterogenous infrastructures : Oral history as method and meaning
- 2022
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Ingår i: Geoforum. - : Elsevier BV. - 0016-7185 .- 1872-9398. ; 134, s. 48-58
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Building on interviews with elderly people living in a low-income and auto-constructed settlement in Kampala, Uganda, this paper explores the notion of heterogenous infrastructure in its local spatial and temporal setting. Our aim is twofold. First, by intently listening to and weaving together situated narratives of how people over time have acquired infrastructural services, such as water, energy, waste, and sanitation, we reveal deeper insights of the socio-political, but also material structures and interactions at play between the State, the disenfranchised, and their intermediaries. Second, we start uncovering the so far largely unexplored potential of oral history as a method to meaningfully interpret the "infrastructural past" of postcolonial and Southern cities where most of ordinary people's experience was never put on record. Our findings point to the usefulness of oral history methods to widen the lens of who and what contributed to the production of fundamental resources for urban life-and its politics.
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| 5. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Turning Livelihood to Rubbish? : The Politics of Value and Valuation in South Africa’s Urban Waste Sector
- 2021
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Ingår i: African Cities and Collaborative Futures. - Manchester : Manchester University Press. ; , s. 97-120
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We will discuss our experience of researching solid waste management politics in South African cities, in particular Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Ekurhuleni. The title of our project – Turning Livelihoods to Waste? – was designed to raise a serious of questions about ongoing trends in the waste sector and the implications. South African household waste management operates under a paradigm of cooperative governance where authority is distributed across various scales of government, business, and society. Recent efforts to expand, improve, and formalize solid household waste management and recycling initiatives have implications for those who currently work with waste - particularly for informal waste pickers or reclaimers, who do much of the primary work with waste in the global south. Despite promises of green economic development and job creation, many people working with waste in South Africa work are subjected to precarious and difficult work conditions or experience new uncertainties and vulnerabilities which threaten existing livelihood strategies. In turn, there are serious questions about whether waste workers should be expected to work in dangerous conditions, and what sorts of alternate arrangements may be more just and more ecologically sustainable.
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| 6. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-
(författare)
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Urban Plants and Colonial Durabilities
- 2020
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Ingår i: The Botanical City. - Berlin : jovis Verlag GmbH. ; , s. 71-81
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The long legacy of colonization that is rooted in how plants are known is mostly out of sight. But at times the colonial legacy of botany becomes all too apparent. This article draws upon ethnograhic field work in Cape Town, South Africa, over several years to contribute knoweldge how colonial and imperial forms of science and colonial management influenced urban botany and later urban ecology. But it points towards a more general argument that is often forgotten when the history of urban ecology and “urban nature knowledge” is written up. This works to decenter or on-stage what has often been silenced in the now taken-for-granted "success" story of the growth of modern urban ecology. What are the colonial remains within urban ecology and urban environmental knowledge today?
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| 7. |
- Ernstson, Henrik, Dr. 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Wasting CO2 and the Clean Development Mechanism : The remarkable success of a climate failure
- 2024
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Ingår i: Environment and Planning E. - : SAGE Publications. - 2514-8486 .- 2514-8494. ; 7:2, s. 654-680
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper examines how global climate mitigation policies articulate with urban political–ecological transformations. It focuses on South African waste-to-value projects as case studies, exploring how local processes of urban ecological modernization combine with global climate finance through the now largely defunct Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Whilst it is generally recognized that waste-related CDM projects in South Africa (and elsewhere) have been an unmitigated failure in terms of climate and socio-economic benefits, we demonstrate that landfillto-gas/energy projects have functioned effectively as geographical–discursive dispositifs through which particular knowledge systems are enrolled, specific ‘solutions’ are projected, and singular imaginaries of what is possible and desirable foregrounded, thereby crowding out alternative possibilities. This not only nurtures the commodification and marketization of non-human matter with an eye towards sustaining capital accumulation but, rather more importantly, successfully installs state-orchestrated private property relations around common resources, thereby deepening the dispossessing socio-ecological relations upon which expanded capitalist reproduction rests. We argue that whilst the formal outcome of the CDM is a failure, its success resides precisely in how it permitted local and global elites to create administrative and regulatory practices that solidify and naturalize a neoliberal market-based framework to approach the climate crisis.
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| 8. |
- Kimari, Wangui, et al.
(författare)
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Imperial Remains and Imperial Invitations : Centering Race within the Contemporary Large-Scale Infrastructures of East Africa
- 2020
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Ingår i: Antipode. - : Wiley. - 0066-4812 .- 1467-8330. ; 3:52, s. 1-22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologizing and resistance to it on the continent.
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| 9. |
- Kimari, Wangui, et al.
(författare)
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The invisible labor of the “New Angola” : Kilamba’s domestic workers
- 2022
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Ingår i: Urban geography. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0272-3638 .- 1938-2847. ; , s. 1-18
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Kilamba, the first of the new centralities in Angola, is increasingly visible in recent urban scholarship about Luanda, further establishing it as the symbol of both this “new” post-war city and the “New Angola.” Within local discourses of progress, its emergence from within “petro-urbanism,” and its size and modern aesthetics are emphasized, while little attention has been directed towards understanding the actual contributions of its workers, particularly the women who spend a significant part of their day cleaning Kilamba’s apartments. In this paper, we combine a social reproduction framework with infrastructure studies to trace the labor of Kilamba’s female domestic workers, in order to demonstrate how their everyday practices uphold the status and materiality of this centrality, even as their work is invisibilized. In doing so, we understand their commentaries about this space, often refracted through descriptions of their homes, as critiques of the infrastructural priorities of the “New Angola.”
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| 10. |
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Lindeka´s Book : Provincializing Malfeasance
- 2021
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Konstnärligt arbete (film/video)abstract
- Synopsis: In eThekwini (formerly named Durban), the young woman Lindeka begins reading Malfeasance (2011). In this essay the French philosopher Michel Serres fleshes out an original take of the modern planetary present, not as something that came about with the advent of agriculture, the industrial revolution or even the postwar “great acceleration.” To Serres this is a story about how humans of every day and age have used tactics and practices of pollution and violence to own and create property for themselves. This is a far cry from conventional justifications of property that can be found in economic theory and the social contracts of Locke and Rousseau. Lindeka is fascinated by the reading, but she also finds Serres´ linear narrative increasingly disturbing for what it omits: Where is Durban, or even Africa in this universalising history of our planet? Striking up a conversation with Michel Serres, Lindeka decides to make her own study of historical difference and global connection in planetary thinking. But not through writing, but through “filmed thought” (Pippin 2020), and by using the possibilities of cinema as a transmodal form for expression. Lindeka engages her filmmaker-friend Vinola and they set about “provincializing” Malfeasance (Chakrabarty 2000) by reading the essay from the locus of eThekwini; thereby allowing Lindeka the reader and her postcolonial port city to kick-back and speak their mind on ownership and environmental concerns to uSerres; now also provincialized through the Zuluization of his name. The result is Lindeka´s Book – an image-book – set in a decolonising moment in South Africa where the registers of film and the city-as-archive play along with, but also trouble the text, the spoken word as the active remains of Eurocentric thought in regards to how we tell stories about our planet and its environments. References:Chakrabarty D. 2000. Provincializing Europe – Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. University of Chicago Press.Serres M. 2011. Malfeasance - Pollution as Appropriation?. Stanford University Press.Pippin. R. 2020. Filmed Thought - Cinema as Reflective Form. University of Chicago Press.
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