Henrik Ernstson

KTH Royal Institute of Technology | KTH · Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering

Abstract: Covid-19's acute phase has now subsided, but its lasting socioeconomic, health and political consequences remain poorly understood, especially in African cities. This paper discusses the pandemic's impacts and grassroots responses in Harare, Kampala, Lilongwe and Nairobi. In these four cities, affiliates of Slum/Shack Dwellers Internation...

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...

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 (C...

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 (C...

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...

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 acqui...

In this paper, we explore the Covid-19 pandemic’s evolving impacts and wide-ranging local initiatives in Mogadishu, Kampala, and Nairobi. Low-income residents often experienced Covid-19 less as a health crisis (especially in its early waves) and more in terms of its devastating socioeconomic, political and violent impacts. Although there were wides...

Covid-19 has inflicted a major health toll while heightening socioeconomic inequalities, and its impacts are still reverberating across the global South. This study examined Covid-19’s complex impacts upon marginalised urban residents in Nairobi and pandemic responses from March 2020 until early 2022 using document analysis and qualitative analysis...

This report analyses how internally displaces persons (IDPs) and other low-income residents in Mogadishu experienced the pandemic and how a complex constellation of state and non-state actors have responded to the crisis. The findings are based on a collaboration with local researchers that carried out focus groups interviews and key informant inte...

Covid-19 has inflicted a major health toll while heightening socioeconomic inequalities, and its impacts are still reverberating across the global South. This study examined Covid-19’s complex impacts upon marginalised urban residents in Kampala, Uganda, in addition to considering several strategies spearheaded by government actors, the private sec...

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 t...

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...

This chapter describes the dynamic institutional, technical, social and political ecological landscape of waste management in South Africa and how this in turn is shaping the practices by which waste is transformed into economic and social value, who is allowed to claim such benefits, and what makes for successful claims. Drawing on urban political...

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 rådig...

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 exa...

The long legacy of colonization that is rooted in how plants are known is mostly out of sight. But at times the colonial legacy of botany becomes all too apparent. This article draws upon ethnograhic field work in Cape Town, South Africa, over several years to contribute knoweldge how colonial and imperial forms of science and colonial management i...

In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large‐scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race...

In this study we explore species richness and traits across two urban gradients in the City of Cape Town. The first is the natural-urban boundary and the second is a socio-economic gradient informed by historical race-based apartheid planning. Plant species and cover were recorded in 156 plots sampled from conservation areas, private gardens, and p...

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the...

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the...

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the...

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the...

Case studies from cities on five continents demonstrate the advantages of thinking comparatively about urban environments. The global discourse around urban ecology tends to homogenize and universalize, relying on such terms as “smart cities,” “eco-cities,” and “resilience,” and proposing a “science of cities” based largely on information from the...

We develop an analytical repertoire for understanding historical interrelationships between water infrastructure, regional environmental politics, and large-scale coastal ecosystems. In doing so, we scrutinize how notions of urban resilience, climate adaptation, and ecosystem-based infrastructure are influencing contemporary planning practice. Our...

This chapter focuses on the book’s central theme on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Framed against the background of five major transformations that deal with planetary urbanisation to de-politicization, we argue that while UPE and associated fields have offered ways to analyse the politics...

The political is categorically and fundamentally performative. Those that gain a voice as equals do not do so by demanding a right to speak within an already policed order, they stage equality and produce new spaces from where equality and freedom can be thought and acted out. This notion of the political, we argue, has to (again) become central in...

We develop the term “the Anthropo-obScene” to show how various discourses on “the Anthropocene” have created a set of stages that disavow certain voices and render some forms of acting (human, non-human, and more-than-human) off-stage. Examples include consensual narratives of adaptive, resilient, and geo-engineered governance, but also more-than-h...

We use postcolonial theory to interrogate the discourse of “the Anthropocene” and its depoliticizing effects. It is maintained that the way that “the Anthropocene” discourse has been articulated within parts of postcolonial theory is deeply problematic and risks making the political itself categorically unthinkable and ontologically evacuated. In a...

"Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities" centres on how to organize anew the articulation between emancipatory theory and political activism. Across its theoretical and empirical chapters, written by leading scholars from anthropology, geography, urban studies, and political science, the book explores new...

Jacob von Heland och Henrik Ernstson är filmande forskare. De har undersökt frågor om ras, natur och kunskapspolitik i Kapstaden, Sydafrika. Filmen One Table Two Elephants, kallad en cinematisk etnografi, ingår i ett forskningsprojekt vid KTH för att visa hur rörlig bild kan vara en del av en samhällsengagerad miljöforskning."—Film är annorlunda, m...

One Table Two Elephants (2018, 84 minutes; #OpenAccess streaming https://vimeo.com/298166514) is a film about bushmen bboys, a flower kingdom and the ghost of a princess. Entering the city through its plants and wetlands, the many-layered, painful and liberating history of the city emerges as we see how biologists, hip hoppers, and wetland activist...

This paper argues that 'the Anthropocene' is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as 'AnthropoScenes', which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and underm...

This article proposes a network analytic approach to the role of frames in shaping the structure of civic organizational fields. Adopting a perspective from the global South, it looks at the impact of the expression “Right to the city” (RTC) over alliance building among civil society actors, exploring patterns of collaborative ties among 129 civil...

Despite growing interest in urban resilience, remarkably little is known about vegetation dynamics in the aftermath of a major urban flooding. In this study, we examined the composition and structure of plant communities across New Orleans (Louisiana, USA) following catastrophic flooding triggered by levee failures during Hurricane Katrina in 2005....

Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the global North. This includes critiques of the universalization of the historically-culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure....

Las redes sociales entre actores y grupos de interés están recibiendo cada vez más atención en los estudios sobre la gestión de los recursos naturales, especialmente en los que se refieren a la gestión adaptativa basada en diferentes formas de participación y cogestión. Las redes sociales se han concebido principalmente como recursos que habilitan...

Las redes sociales entre actores y grupos de interés están recibiendo cada vez más atención en los estudios sobre la gestión de los recursos naturales, especialmente en los que se refieren a la gestión adaptativa basada en diferentes formas de participación y cogestión. Las redes sociales se han concebido principalmente como recursos que habilitan...

This paper addresses three interventions into urban green spaces—a wetland in Cape Town, a post-industrial site in New York, and a park outside London. Through their different contexts, they help to grasp a wider phenomenon: the protection of urban nature through the development of protective narratives. We analyze these interventions as examples o...

This piece focuses on the making of an "eco-estate" in Cape Town and its social and ecological effects. These "eco-estates" enrol and depoliticises environmental arguments to create a "green" life-style choice for the rich. “Eco-estates” —often placed on pristine land outside the urban edge—represent a deeply problematic and pervasive urban develop...

Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce P. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assum...

Co-tutelle PhD students enter an agreement with two universities, commonly in two different countries, to be enrolled, supervised, and examined by both universities. Many universities now promote co-tutelle agreements to enhance international collaborations, yet not much information exists on actual co-tutelle experiences. At the end of my candidat...

We outline a first framing of a conference and planned edited book: “Rupturing the Anthro-Obscene! Political Promises of Planetary & Uneven Urban Ecologies.” The book and event (in Stockholm 16-19 Sept 2015) is an intervention into the field of urban political ecology (UPE) in particular, and critical theory in general. We argue that while UPE has...

Ernstson H., Lawhon M. and Duminy J. Conceptual vectors of African urbanism: ‘engaged theory-making’ and ‘platforms of engagement’, Regional Studies. With increasing urbanization in the global South, and Africa in particular, scholars have called attention to the limited explanatory capacity of existing theory. Ananya Roy suggests developing concep...

The Princess Vlei Wetland in Cape Town, South Africa, has been part of a public debate since 2010 when a plan to build a shopping centre at the wetland resurfaced. This matured a civic-led coalition in opposition, which aimed to ecologically rehabilitate the area as a community and heritage park. These activities have come to ‘load’ Princess Vlei w...

Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a...

This article examines the role played by urban gardens during historical collapses in urban food supply lines and identifies the social processes required to protect two critical elements of urban food production during times of crisis—open green spaces and the collective memory of how to grow food. Advanced communication and transport technologies...

The paper demonstrates how ecosystem services can be viewed and studied as a social practice of value articulation. With this follows that when ecosystem services appear as objects of calculated value in decision-making they are already tainted by the social and cannot be viewed as merely reflecting an objective biophysical reality. Using urban cas...

A framework is constructed for how to relate ecosystem services to environmental justice. The benefits humans and society can derive from biophysical processes cannot be viewed as objectively existing "out there", but as entangled in social and political processes. This is unpacked through the analytical moments of generation, distribution and arti...

Theoretically, co-management provides a fruitful way to engage local residents in efforts to conserve and manage particular spaces of ecological value. However, natural resource management, and biodiversity conservation in particular, are faced with novel sets of complexities in the rapidly urbanizing areas of Cape Town, South Africa, and in the ne...

For much of the twentieth century natural resource management centered on efforts to control nature in order to harvest products from it, while reducing risks to society. The central tenet was to achieve predictable outcomes, a strategy that almost invariably led to reduced biological diversity and a reduction of the range of variation in natural s...

[From Introduction] This chapter will strive to add to contributions made by other authors in describing and explaining transformative change. Special attention will be paid to elucidate the collective nature of these transformations, hence the title of transformative collective action. The analysis will show that in order to bring about radical in...

This op-ed piece in a leading Swedish daily newspaper, argues for pushing for more environmentally sensitive urban planning, in particular around the then new development at Stockholm University. The op-ed was based on a concrete proposal on how to build and the development of a set of "social-ecological design principles" by the collective of auth...

Urban ecosystem services are crucial for human well-being and the livability of cities. A central challenge for sustaining ecosystem services lies in addressing scale mismatches between ecological processes on one hand, and social processes of governance on the other. This article synthesizes a set of case studies from urban green areas in Stockhol...

Urbanization is a global multidimensional process paired with increasing uncertainty due to climate change, migration of people, and changes in the capacity to sustain ecosystem services. This article lays a foundation for discussing transitions in urban governance, which enable cities to navigate change, build capacity to withstand shocks, and use...

Aims To highlight the potential value of network analysis for conservation biogeography and to focus attention on some of the challenges that lie ahead in applying it to conservation problems. Location Global. Methods We briefly review existing literature and then focus on five important challenges for the further development of network‐based appro...

This report analyses a real-world urban design proposal at Albano, part of Stockholm University Campus in Sweden, from a social-ecological systems perspective drawing on non-equilibrium resilience theory. The report merges landscape ecology with urban design to analyse a range of ecosystem services in conjunction with urban services to understand h...

With rapid worldwide urbanization it is urgent that we understand processes leading to the protection of urban green areas and ecosystems. Although natural reserves are often seen as preserving ‘higher valued’ rather than ‘lower valued’ nature, it is more adequate to describe them as outcomes of selective social articulation processes. This is illu...

Vår idéskiss söker skapa ett konstruk-tivt möte mellan innerstaden och Na-tionalstadsparken och tydliggöra Al-bano som en mötesplats mellan Stock-holms tre största universitet och en rad mindre högskolor. Samtidigt vill vi väva en social-ekologisk väv för att generera stads-och ekosystemtjänster. Genom tre stråk och flera element väver PATCH WORK r...

[NOTE: This is the early conference paper of the later publication called "The social production of ecosystem services: A framework for studying environmental justice and ecological complexity in urbanized landscapes" published in Landscape and Urban Planning in 2013, 109(1):7-17 ] Recent findings have demonstrated urban nature as a source of eco...

"Exploitation and degradation of urban green areas reduce their capacity to sustain ecosystem services. In protecting and managing these areas, research has increasingly focused on actors in civil society. Here, we analyzed an urban movement of 62 civil-society organizations--from user groups, such as boating clubs and allotment gardens, to culture...

"Social networks among actors and stakeholders are gaining attention in studies of natural resource management, particularly those of adaptive management based on different forms of participation and co-management. In this sense, social networks have primarily been envisioned as enabling different actors to collaborate and coordinate management eff...

Formal models used to study the resilience of social-ecological systems have not explicitly included important structural characteristics of this type of system. In this paper, we propose a network perspective for social-ecological systems that enables us to better focus on the structure of interactions between identifiable components of the system...

"Formal models used to study the resilience of social-ecological systems have not explicitly included important structural characteristics of this type of system. In this paper, we propose a network perspective for social-ecological systems that enables us to better focus on the structure of interactions between identifiable components of the syste...

This study addresses social-ecological dynamics in the greater metropolitan area of Stockholm County, Sweden, with special focus on the National Urban Park (NUP). It is part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) and has the following specific objectives: (1) to provide scientific information on biodiversity patterns, ecosystem dynamics, and e...