This paper addresses three interventions into urban green spaces—a wetland in Cape Town, a postindustrial site in New York, and a park outside London. Through their different contexts, they help to graspa wider phenomenon: the protection of urban nature through the development of protective narratives.We analyze these interventions as examples of “value articulation”, which we view as a relational and sociomaterial practice that requires the enrolment of people, plants, and things that together perform,spread, and deploy stories about why given places need protection. For each case study, we also highlight the moments when narrative practices move beyond mere protection and start to change the very contextin which they were developed. We refer to these as projective narratives, emphasizing how novel valuesand uses are projected onto these spaces, opening them up for reworking. Our analyses of these successful attempts to protect land demonstrate how values emerge as part of inclusive, yet specific, narratives thatmobilize and broaden support and constituencies. By constructing spatial linkages, such narratives embed places in wider geographical ‘wholes’ and we observe how the physical landscape itself becomes an activenarrative element. In contrast to rationalist and external frameworks for analyzing values in relation tourban natures (e.g., ecosystem services), our ‘bottom-up’ mode situates urban nature in specific contexts,helping us to profoundly rethink planning and practice in order to (i) challenge expert categories and city/nature dichotomies; (ii) provide vernacular ways of knowing/understanding; and (iii) rethink the role of urban designers.

This paper addresses three interventions into urban green spaces—a wetland in Cape Town, a post- industrial site in New York, and a park outside London. Through their different contexts, they help to grasp a wider phenomenon: the protection of urban nature through the development of protective narratives. We analyze these interventions as examples of “value articulation”, which we view as a relational and sociomaterial practice that requires the enrolment of people, plants, and things that together perform, spread, and deploy stories about why given places need protection. For each case study, we also highlight the moments when narrative practices move beyond mere protection and start to change the very context in which they were developed. We refer to these as projective narratives, emphasizing how novel values and uses are projected onto these spaces, opening them up for reworking. Our analyses of these successful attempts to protect land demonstrate how values emerge as part of inclusive, yet specific, narratives that mobilize and broaden support and constituencies. By constructing spatial linkages, such narratives embed places in wider geographical ‘wholes’ and we observe how the physical landscape itself becomes an active narrative element. In contrast to rationalist and external frameworks for analyzing values in relation to urban natures (e.g., ecosystem services), our ‘bottom-up’ mode situates urban nature in specific contexts, helping us to profoundly rethink planning and practice in order to (i) challenge expert categories and city/nature dichotomies; (ii) provide vernacular ways of knowing/understanding; and (iii) rethink the role of urban designers.

Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the global North. This includes critiques of the universalization of the historically-culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. We introduce the notion of “heterogeneous infrastructure configurations” (HICs) as a way to analyze urban infrastructure that builds on postcolonial critiques of knowledge, as well as ethnographies of everyday Southern urbanisms. We argue that the notion of HIC helps us to move beyond technological and performative accounts of actually existing infrastructures to provide an analytical lens through which to compare different configurations. Our approach enables a clearer analysis of infrastructural artifacts not as individual objects but as parts of geographically spread socio-technological configurations: configurations which might involve many different kinds technologies, relations, capacities and operations, entailing different risks and power relationships. We use examples from ongoing research on sanitation and waste in Kampala, Uganda- a city in which service delivery is characterized by multiplicity, overlap, disruption and inequality- to demonstrate the kinds of research questions that emerge when thinking through the notion of HICs.

Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to 'learning to unlearn' unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing entails a socio-spatial situation. The authors' efforts to grapple with operationalizing learning to unlearn in three different urban cases are described, followed by an articulation of strategies for theorizing which more explicitly acknowledge theory-building's situatedness as well as points of reflection for developing postcolonial urban theory. It is argued that this usefully shifts the focus of unlearning from 'who' is theorizing 'where' towards theory's unstated norms and assumptions.

This article examines the role played by urban gardens during historical collapses in urban food supply lines and identifies the social processes required to protect two crit- ical elements of urban food production during times of crisis—open green spaces and the collective memory of how to grow food. Advanced communication and transport technologies allow food sequestration from the farthest reaches of the planet, but have markedly increasing urban dependence on global food systems over the past 50 years. Simultaneously, such advances have eroded collective memory of food production, while suitable spaces for urban gardening have been lost. These factors combine to heighten the potential for food shortages when—as occurred in the 20th century— major economic, political or environmental crises sever supply lines to urban areas. This paper considers how to govern urban areas sustainably in order to ensure food security in times of crisis by: evincing the effectiveness of urban gardening during crises; showing how allotment gardens serve as conduits for transmitting collective social-ecological memories of food production; and, discussing roles and strategies of urban environmental movements for protecting urban green space. Urban gardening and urban social movements can build local ecological and social response capacity against major collapses in urban food supplies. Hence, they should be incorporated as central elements of sustainable urban development. Urban governance for resilience should be historically informed about major food crises and allow for redundant food production solutions as a response to uncertain futures.

Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical-materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to provide a critique of society.We argue that there aremultipleways of expanding this framing, including through political ecology or wider currents of Marxism. Here, we demonstrate one possibility: starting from theory and empirics in the South, specifically, African urbanism. We show how African urbanism can inform UPE and the associated research methods, theory and practice to create a more situated UPE. We begin suggesting what a situated UPE might entail: starting with everyday practices, examining diffuse forms of power, and opening the scope for radical incrementalism.

Parks and private and public gardens do not exist in isolation, but form part of the urban fabric, contributing to ecological functioning. There is growing interest in how civil society shapes urban ecologies and vegetation patterns. This paper explores the ecological outcomes of a series of indigenous plant greening interventions in Cape Town. The six different sites were sampled: two civic-led intervention sites, one expert-led rehabilitation site, two conservation sites and one abandoned site. These sites are compared in terms of their plant and insect diversity and then discussed in relation to their contingent management arrangements and in relation to conservation and abandoned land. Plant and insect diversity measured at the civic-led greening intervention sites suggest these sites are similar to adjacent conservation sites, while floristic composition differs. The inclusion of a vacant lot with poor species and growth form diversity shows the significant role of intervention in the ecological reformation of urban green space. By emphasizing the ecological outcomes, this study highlights the importance of civil society in linking conservation goals to more broad-based notions of quality of life and the 'good and just city'. Our results indicate that civic-led efforts warrant attention in keeping with those of experts, both in relation to meeting indigenous conservation targets, as well as supporting functional groups and wider ecological processes, with the acknowledged exception of fire. How to integrate such civic-led interventions into urban biodiversity management planning is still an open question.

Social networks play an important role in facilitating effective and sustained connections between people responsible for regional conservation plans and those responsible for local conservation actions. Yet, few studies have utilized social network analysis in systematic conservation planning initiatives; this, in spite of social network analysis being developed as a structural and relational approach to describe and ana- lyze the characteristics of patterns of relationships that make collaborative efforts more or less effective at solving natural resource management problems. Systematic conservation planning provides a frame- work for allocating actions in time and space to promote the conservation of biodiversity. Our study dis- cusses three potential contributions of social network analysis to systematic conservation planning: identifying stakeholders and their roles in social networks, and characterizing relationships between them; designing and facilitating strategic networking to strengthen linkages between local and regional conservation initiatives; and prioritizing conservation actions using measures of social connectivity alongside ecological data. We propose that social network analysis has the potential to be a valuable tool to support decision making in conservation planning. We identify challenges and future research ques- tions to be addressed to allow the integration of social network analysis into conservation planning processes.?