Kampala is the heartbeat of Uganda’s economy and has driven rural-urban migration over the years as people travel in search of better opportunities (Namwanje, 2022). This has led to rapid urbanisation and unprecedented growth of the informal sector that extends beyond the geographical confines of the city.

Rural areas, acting as spatial extensions of the city, have served as productive landscapes, supporting Kampala’s bustling informal economy and the livelihoods of city dwellers. Over the years, large expanses of uncultivated land in rural areas and natural forests in some cases, have been replaced with monocultural commercial forests causing socio-ecological degradation in Kampala’s city region.

While studying past and current trends in Uganda’s forest governance, as well as the socio-cultural relations between people and forests, the study brings to light the social and epistemic injustices of past and current exclusionary forestry policies and practices. Storytelling is used not only as an investigative tool to understand the lives of the Batwa indigenous forest peoples, but also as an approach to document local knowledges and envision an alternative future outside the realm of western technocratic approaches. Counter-storytelling operates as activism, transcending oppression while fostering emanicipation and transformation of the Batwa people. In so doing, the project seeks to achieve self-determination for a just forest economy in Kampala’s city region. ... Read more

The first decades of the 21st century are defined by an expected shortage of fossil resources and an emerging climate crisis which make the transition towards renewable energy resources not only inevitable but also urgent. In the process of this transition, the Port of Rotterdam, associated with the biggest fossil fuel industry landscape in Europe, is confronted with the danger of becoming a drosscape. As the Province of Zuid Holland attempts to deal with this challenge under the umbrella of circularity, new issues regarding environmental and social justice in the whole area arise and call for a coordinated planning effort towards a just transition. This effort begins by answering how can the province use the obsolete fossil fuel infrastructure to transform the port‘s material landscapes fostering spatial justice and balancing the problematic relationship between natural and man-made systems.

Consequently, the project decodes the layers of the material, social and environmental dimensions investigating the critical issues that associate with the port‘s distinctive territories. In parallel, it defines the main concepts that can instruct this just transition arising from the fenced urban and port districts towards the whole province and combining top-down with bottom-up planning processes. As the project evolves in time, starting at the most critical territories as nodal points and involving all the different actors, it takes the form of a central green-blue spine that meets Zuid-Holland‘s energy demands while embodying a redefined symbiosis between nature and human. The result defines a new paradigm for the energy transition and the remediation of fossil fuel drosscapes that incorporates material circularity, environmental and social justice under the concept of “Energy Habitat“. ... Read more