Introduction

Now, we come to the question of what to do with this interactionist map of reading Africa's urban environments politically. Doing something with this is itself an explicit component of the situatedness of urban political ecology (UPE) in African contexts (Lawhon et al, 2014). The literature on the cities of the Global South and Southern urban planning makes plain that practice and engagement for urban change ought to be constituent elements of any theory (Watson, 2009a, 2009b; Parnell and Oldfield, 2014). Facing the panoply of ideas that an interactionist, multi-vocal approach throws up can be paralyzing. The contrapuntal or polyphonic character of the reading or listening to urban environments has the potential to be debilitating. We might in effect be stopped by what Robinson (forthcoming) refers to as singularities, where each story is unique, and thus might require different theories, or lead to different ideas or solutions to environmental issues (see also Robinson, 2013; Söderström, 2014).

Instead, can we think of these instances, spaces, and realms of urban environments as revisable, contextual, nuanced, and negotiated? Such an approach would commonsensically suggest, instead of an incomparable mess, that in different cities, in different parts of these cities, at different times, with different issues, different approaches are called for, but that, at the same time, seeing and reading the interrelationships of the environmental consciousness (and unconsciousness) of the experts, the past, the cityscape, the artists, and the grassroots in a given place and time may provide opportunities for “better,” more socially and environmentally sustainable and liberatory urban development. This lens may thus help produce what Pieterse (2008) calls “radical incrementalism.” It is my belief that we can build better bridges between communities and urban environment-and-development when we have in sight and mind the elite or expert analysis of issues, the past of the problem, the physical and metaphysical cityscape context, and the variegated artistic imaginations, along with diverse grassroots voices.

Examples of interactionist urban political ecologies in practice

A great many well-intended programs and policies have been developed for Africa's cities. Whether these have the “aim of ameliorating poverty, rescuing the environment [or] growing local economies,” they tend to “come with built-in assumptions about the nature of the city, its people, cultures and possible futures” (Pieterse and Simone, 2009, as cited in Pieterse, 2013: 12).