List relocates Dakar’s ecological question into territorial politics. Her ethnographic analysis of Pikine examines struggles over urban farmland and the coalitions through which residents, political actors and development interests negotiate rights to use and transform land. The iconic idea is that territory is not a passive surface awaiting planning but an unstable achievement produced through alliances, claims and conflicts. Urban agriculture becomes especially revealing because it occupies land desired simultaneously for livelihood, development and speculative conversion. The methodological operation combines political ecology with ethnography, tracing access and control through social relations rather than treating land tenure as a purely legal category. Its bridge to urban governance is precise: ecological persistence depends on coalition-building and political authority as much as on environmental value. Green space becomes a contested territorial project whose future is shaped by who can mobilise legitimacy, networks and institutional recognition.
URBANISM MEETS ART