Cissé and colleagues make urban green decline in Dakar measurable across three decades without reducing it to a single contemporary snapshot. Using satellite imagery and land-use classification for 1990–2022, the study identifies a fall in green-space coverage from 13.36% to 9.54% while built-up land rises from 19.23% to 39.34%. The iconic operation is temporal: urban expansion is read as a conversion process in which green land becomes built surface or bare soil, making environmental loss visible as a trajectory rather than an isolated deficit. The theoretical contribution lies in linking urbanisation to ecosystem-service erosion at metropolitan scale. Methodologically, remote sensing allows the authors to distinguish spatial change across Dakar’s green infrastructure while retaining the uneven geography of urban expansion. The wider bridge is to environmental governance: satellite evidence becomes a public epistemic instrument capable of turning otherwise diffuse urban transformation into a legible planning problem.
URBANISM MEETS ART