Lunch seminar: Scaling deep at the margins: coproduction of nature-based solutions as decolonial praxis in Cape Town
WaterCentre@KTH proudly presents a lunch seminar with Urban planner Dr. Patience Mguni, Assistant Professor at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at Copenhagen University.
Time: Wed 2025-10-15 12.00 - 13.00
Location: Climate Action House, Teknikringen 43
Language: English
Participating: Urban planner Patience Mguni
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are increasingly seen as a pathway towards sustainable and resilient urban development. This seminar draws on a transdisciplinary project in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town, to explore how NbS experiments can be reimagined through a decolonial lens. The retrofitting of a stormwater detention pond is considered not only as a techno-ecological intervention but also as a social process in a city still grappling with the legacies of apartheid.
Using the concept of ‘scaling deep at the margins,’ the project emphasizes embedding NbS within local contexts, engaging with resistance, discomfort, and power asymmetries to generate insights for just transformations. Community resistance in Cape Town highlighted stormwater ponds as contested spaces tied to histories of dispossession, while also asserting agency and reconfiguring power relations.
The seminar argues that sustainability transitions in postcolonial contexts must foreground justice, embrace indigenous and local knowledge, and recognize resistance and desire as vital drivers for reimagining urban spaces.