Lake Victoria is the world’s largest tropical lake and the third-largest water body, providingsignificant water resources for surrounding environments including the cultural, societal, andlivelihood needs of people in its basin and along the White Nile. The aim of this study was to usedecade-long time series of measured lake flow in the lake system and phosphorus deposition todevelop a suitable numerical model based on shallow water equations (SWE) for assessing waterquality in Lake Victoria, an increasingly important tool under climate variation. Different tech-niques were combined to identify a numerical model that included: i) a high-resolution SWEmodel to establish raindrop diffusion to trace pollutants; ii) a two-dimensional (2D) verticallyintegrated SWE model to establish lake surface flow and vertically transported wind speed flowacting on lake surface water by wind stress; and iii) a site-specific phosphorus deposition sub-model to calculate atmospheric deposition in the lake. A smooth (non-oscillatory) solution wasobtained by applying a high-resolution scheme for a raindrop diffusion model. Analysis with thevertically integrated SWE model generated depth averages for flow velocity and associatedchanges in water level profile in the lake system and showed unidirectional whole lake windblowing from the southwest to northeast. The atmospheric phosphorous deposition modelenabled water value assessment for mass balances with different magnitudes of both inflows andoutflows demonstrating annual total phosphorus at 13, 500 tons concentrating at mid-lakewestern and eastern parts. The model developed here is simple and suitable for use in assess-ing flow changes and lake level changes and can serve as a tool in studies of lake bathymetry andnutrient and pollution transport processes. Our study opens towards refining models of complexshallow-water systems

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.

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.

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.”

Scholars usually conceptualize civil society as both a discursive and an associational space. In the former, focus is on communicative practices; in the latter, attention shifts to the actors that cooperate or clash about the identification and production of collective goods. In this chapter, we sketch the contours of an approach to civil society that treats both dimensions in an integrated way. Looking at the role of food issues in urban settings as diverse as Cape Town, Bristol, and Glasgow, we borrow from social network analysis to explore first, how civic organizations combine an interest in food-related issues with attention to other themes, thus defining different, specific agendas; next, we ask if and how interest in food identifies specific clusters of cooperation within broader civil society networks.

Kampala has a complex set of regulations describing actors, rules and procedures for collection and transportation of waste, and requires waste to be disposed of at the landfill. Yet little of the city’s waste moves through this “formal system”. Building on wider scholarship on urban infrastructure and calls to theorize from southern cities, we examine recycling in Kampala as a heterogeneous infrastructure configuration. Kampala’s lively recycling sector is socially and materi- ally diverse: it is comprised of entrepreneurs, public-private partner- ships and non-governmental organizations, as well as a range of materials with different properties and value. We articulate how actors assert claims, obtain permissions, build and maintain relation- ships as they rework flows away from the landfill. We argue that recognizing socio-material heterogeneity throughout the waste con- figuration enables a clearer analysis of contested processes of claim- ing value from waste. We also demonstrate how these efforts have pressured the state to reconsider the merits of the modern infra- structure ideal as a model for what (good) infrastructure is and ought to be. Various actors assert more heterogeneous alternatives, raising the possibility of alternative modes of infrastructure which might generate better incomes and improve service provision.

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.

Rapporten presenterar 2020 års verksamhet inom det gemensamma vetenskapliga rådet mellan Stockholms stad och KTH. Rapporten sammanfattar rådets arbete kring temat "Fossilfri och tillgänglig transport och mobilitet" som utgick från stadens "Klimathandlingsplan 2020–2023." Den tydligaste strategiska perspektivet som rådet lyft fram är den kring rådighet; att Klimathandlingsplanen fokuserar på bränsleomställning där staden har svag eller ingen rådighet, samtidigt som de områden där staden har tydlig rådighet (till exempel stadsplanering) hamnar i skymundan. Flertal vägar framåt lyfts fram för att gå vidare.

This first issue of Annals of Crosscuts includes eleven richly textured films that speak from the growing environmental humanities with strong intent and originality. The films speaks to the theme of "Ruptured Times" and forms a testimony to the integrative ambitions of the environmental humanities. The contributors come from a range of disciplines, schools and practices including artistic research, urban and architectural studies, social movements of the urban south, political ecologies of water, studies of mining legacies, decolonial performance aesthetics, science studies and ethnographies of conservation, toxicity and more-than-human relations. Made in ten countries, at four continents, the films are the final outcomes of a collaborative peer-review process that started in the first half of 2019, screened at the Crosscuts festival in late 2019 and published as a film-based special issue at Zenodo, CERN, in 2021 with a reflection from chief editor Jacob von Heland.