Contribution short abstract:

This paper explores green infrastructure planning initiatives in East Africa that are being promoted as measures for urban sustainability. It critiques the conservativism at the heart of these visions while outlining unexpected potentials for more expansive commoning.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper examines recent green infrastructure intitiatives across East Africa that are being hailed as nature-based strategies for urban sustainability, especially in settings of rapid urban expansion. Measures such green roofs, tree-lined streets or greened traffic islands in many cases blend into cities without substantially challenging the existing road layout or impeding the flow of urban life. Urban green infrastructure, as a rather quick technofix for rapid urbanization and connected problems, promises minor improvements towards sustainable futures but at the same promotes a conservative agenda of liberal capitalist business-as-usual. In some cases well-intended internationally-financed greening measures caused displacement and do little more than greenwash urban development. However, anthropologists can find resources to think green growth more expansively, even at the heart of urban planning, development and policy where increasingly abstract sustainability metrics and indicators are proliferating. My paper distills such forms of thinking from green infrastructure projects and analyzes ways in which they make forms of more-than-human labor visible.