Abstract

Green Infrastructure (GI) connects across a city's urban fabric and exhibits multiple meanings. It inevitably ties to questions about environmental justice. In South Africa, the historical legacy of colonialism and apartheid has left deep scars and the fragmentation of people and places. The justice issues surrounding urban GI are many, complex and unpredictable. They include insecurity, contested access to urban parks, differing perceptions of equity, contested ownership of urban vegetation, and alienation mediated local community involvement. In this systematic review, we analyze 72 scientific publications connecting urban GI and environmental justice in South Africa to identify current research trends. Using the conceptual frame of environmental justice, we structure our analysis around the commonly-used dimensions of distribution, process, and recognition, with added attention to governance. Our review shows that food security, distributional equity, and physical access to urban green space are dominant, with similarities in the spatial and temporal scales of investigation. Environmental justice studies and political ecology are comparable, and we argue that 1) Research on GI access should follow a more nuanced and rights-based approach, 2) a stronger ecological and climatic/biophysical perspective would be valuable, and 3) integrating landscape designs could uncover more actionable and transformative potential. Common across these three avenues of research is a need to embrace more interdisciplinary, participatory, anticipatory, and dynamic thinking across a broader range of scales.

Keywords: urban green infrastructure, environmental justice, climate change, collaborative learning, transformative change

How to Cite:

Pasgaard, M., Breed, C., Engemann Jensen, K. & Brom, P., (2025) “Connecting urban green infrastructure and environmental justice in South Africa: Integrating social access, ecology, and design”, Journal of Political Ecology 32(1): 6213. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.6213