Presentation short abstract

This talk explores how emotion shapes urban conservation in Nairobi’s greenspaces. Drawing on my PhD research, it reveals how care, grief and resistance in places like Nairobi National Park, Karura and City Park Forests expose deeper struggles over belonging, justice and the future of urban nature.

Presentation long abstract

Urban greenspaces are often imagined as spaces of renewal, healing, and ecological balance. Yet in cities like Nairobi, they are also charged emotional terrains — places where histories of exclusion, loss, and longing are inscribed in the soil, trees, and fences that demarcate belonging. Drawing on my doctoral research on the socio-political reconstruction of urban protected areas, this presentation explores how emotion and memory mediate everyday encounters with conservation and environmental governance in Nairobi.

Through ethnographic and visual inquiry, I trace how local residents, vendors, and stewards articulate affective relationships to urban nature—ranging from pride and nostalgia to grief and alienation. These emotional geographies illuminate the deep contradictions of Nairobi’s “green renaissance,” where urban nature reserves/ protected areas such as Nairobi National Park, Karura Forest and City Park Forest are celebrated as symbols of progress while reproducing social boundaries inherited from colonial land regimes and contemporary elite urbanism.

By centering emotion as both method and matter of inquiry, this paper argues that feelings of displacement, care, and resistance are vital to understanding the lived politics of conservation. I suggest that attending to these affective dimensions enables more grounded, humane, and decolonial visions of urban ecological futures—where justice is not only institutional but also emotional, embodied, and relational.

This work also informs my short documentary, Green Shadows of Injustice, which translates these affective ecologies into visual storytelling as a form of research, mourning, and repair.