Knowledges and attachments to urban plants in Sub-Saharan Africa (Benin, Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal): identification and production of a heritage from below – INFRAPATRI

The program’s activities involved four types of methodological approaches: 1. reading workshops and work meetings, 2. field research, 3. artistic contributions, and 4. geomatics work.

1. Regular team work sessions were organized, mostly online due first to the COVID-19 pandemic and then to the geographical spread of INFRAPATRI members across two continents. A one-week mid-project workshop was also held in January 2024 in Porto-Novo, Benin, with a significant portion of the team present in person, including artists based on the African continent.

2. In terms of data collection methodology, several ethnographic fieldwork sessions were conducted in each city between 2021 and 2025, most often in the form of multidisciplinary collaborations involving, for example, anthropologists and geographer in Porto-Novo, anthropologist and historian in Ìbàdàn, or geographers and botanists in Yaoundé. These fieldwork researchs also involved scholars with varying levels of experience depending on the sites, ranging from master’s students to senior researchers, including doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, particularly in Benin.

3. Some artists were also invited to collaborate with researchers from the fieldwork stage onward, through a “fieldwork-creation” approach, for example in Ìbàdàn and Yaounde. These collaborations resulted in the production of artistic works, in dialogue with scientific data from the fieldwork, across a wide range of mediums, from photography and drawing to painting and ironwork, as well as documentary video and performance art.

4. In parallel with these fieldwork sessions, geomatics work (mapping and teledetection) was conducted using satellite and GIS data available for the four cities. Green areas were identified via teledetection using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, by measuring luminance (intensity of reflected energy) during the dry and wet seasons. Data processing (NDVI, classifications) combined with open-source data (OpenStreetMap, a global open-source mapping project) thus enabled the production of detailed scientific and sensitive vegetation maps for each city. By measuring landscape ecology indices, we were able to describe and map the spatial organization of green spaces across the four cities, revealing both similarities and differences in terms of the quantity and fragmentation of vegetation. This quantification of vegetation viewed from the sky was supplemented for Ìbàdàn by a mapping of vegetation visible at pedestrian height from public spaces. The use of the Treepedia method, based on Google Street View images, thus makes it possible to characterize the extent of visible vegetation in several neighborhoods with distinct profiles.

In each of the four cities studied, in various ways, certain plant elements and patches (isolated individuals, specific formations, particular species) are the objects of intense attachment for certain categories of city dwellers (varying according to socio-economic status, gender, generation, length of residence in the city, religious affiliation, etc.), particularly within an “infra-heritage” dynamic (as repositories of memory at various scales, from the lineage to the city, as historical markers, or as concrete reminders of family origins prior to settling in the city).

But interactions between plants and inhabitants can also be linked to attachment for other (non-exclusive) reasons: culinary, medicinal, ritual, aesthetic, ecological, or even as spaces for sociability (particularly through work or leisure) in everyday life.

Finally, other categories of urban dwellers interact with plants in ways ranging from contempt—including rejection to the village and the forest—to fear. The latter can be expressed in terms of health (plants harbor dangerous pests, such as snakes, or sources of disease, such as mosquitoes) or safety hazards (trees may fall on homes during the rainy season, and wooded areas are home to illegal and illicit activities—such as drug dealing, prostitution, or even ritual crimes), and sometimes in magical-religious terms (the plants are home to capricious and ambivalent entities, potentially dangerous, of the “witch” or “forest spirit” types). In certain contexts, such as in Nigeria and Benin, vegetation can thus become a stake, or at least a collateral victim, in a competition between local religions that favor plants and evangelical churches, which call for the destruction of any host of “devilish” entities or practices—including certain trees or wooded areas in the city.

Furthermore, in the face of the diversity of these relationships between inhabitants and plants in the four cities, urban authorities seem to share a common tendency to ignore citizens' attachment to urban vegetation and green spaces, in favor of land artificialization and the development of buildings and infrastructures. This is often done at the expense of pre-existing plants and objects of attachment, particularly in "infra-heritage" terms.

With the exception of Ìbàdàn, which does not have capital city status, the other three cities are experiencing greening initiatives led by public authorities and often supported by international urban cooperation, under the umbrella of the global model of the “sustainable” or “green” city. Nevertheless, these initiatives are most often based on external ecological, economic, hygienic, or aesthetic criteria, imposed without consultation with citizens in all their diversity, and which fail to take into account—or even go against—the inhabitants' attachment to plants, particularly pre-existing ones.

The research initiated as part of the INFRAPATRI project could be continued and deepened from historical, political (in relation to institutions), and ecological perspectives—which have been less explored so far—by strengthening collaborations between the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences.

In parallel with new research in the four project cities building on INFRAPATRI’s work in these directions, the establishment of a scientific network in the humanities and social sciences could be considered to bring together researchers working on nature in the city across the African continent, particularly in the fields of environmental humanities and urban political ecology.

Furthermore, the importance of collaborations between researchers and artists at the heart of the knowledge-production dynamic within the project opens up several possibilities. First, the dialogue established between artistic works and scientific outputs during the project’s closing exhibition could be replicated in other contexts and in various formats.

Second, the collaboration between artists and researchers beginning in the field phase in the form of “creative inquiry”—as implemented within the INFRAPATRI framework—resonates with other researchers and artists working according to a similar methodology. INFRAPATRI is thus fully part of a broader dynamic of establishing collaborative networks in the rapidly expanding field of research-creation. New collaborations based on these same modalities and addressing themes similar to those of INFRAPATRI are also currently being formalized with certain project members.

Finally, INFRAPATRI opens up exciting prospects for exchanges between social science researchers and institutional actors in urban planning, nature conservation, and heritage preservation, particularly regarding cities on the African continent. This dynamic of exchange has already been initiated with international institutions such as the FAO (UN)’s “Green City” team, as part of the webinar “Greening Cities in Africa” co-organized with the UMR Les Afriques dans le Monde (LAM) in early 2026. It will continue through meetings with other international institutions and within the context of each of the four cities studied by the project.

The interdisciplinary project INFRAPATRI aims to study the local knowledges and forms of attachment to urban plants in four sub-Saharan African cities : Yaounde in Cameroon, Ibadan in Nigeria, Porto-Novo in Benin and Dakar in Senegal. Our reflection is based on the notion of "heritage from below", allowing us to understand the relationship of city dwellers to plants in terms of memory and conceptions of the past, rarely recognized by institutional approaches to heritage conservation. Plants in the city, which cover multiple figures and spaces, are in fact used in a variety of ways based on practical or symbolic knowledge. Together, this knowledge and uses are produced by various urban collectives based on family, ethnic identity, religion, neighbourhood, profession or political representation. We formulate the hypothesis that they are preserved and transmitted through different channels at the basis of various forms of urban identifications. The aim of the project will be to identify these forms of heritage from below emanating from plural relationships to plants, and to analyse them in the light of past and present institutional attempts to patrimonialise urban plant entities and groupings.

This research project is based on a comparative. The four cities selected for the survey present contrasting but not dissimilar histories and ecosystems. All of them are also threatened today by urbanization policies determined by a certain conception of "modernity" promoting the use of concrete, the artificialization of soils and highly regulated greening methods, in addition to land and property speculation. Nevertheless, in each of these cities, urban plants have recently been brought up to date by new urban elites or public authorities, through the prism of the global model of the "sustainable city" promoted by international cooperation and major development agencies.

Within the framework of INFRAPATRI, interdisciplinary collaborations between human and social sciences and natural sciences will be set up in order to understand urban nature both as a historical, social and cultural construction and as a set of living elements with tangible physical, biological and ecological properties. The project also places great emphasis on collaboration between scientists and visual and audiovisual artists, not only in terms of disseminating the results to a variety of audiences (inhabitants, urban planning and sustainable development actors, academic and cultural actors) but also in terms of survey methodology. This interdisciplinary project thus brings together geographers, anthropologists, historian, botanists and artists from Benin, Cameroon, France, Nigeria and Senegal, all of whom are familiar with the cities selected for the survey and the project's issues.

To address INFRAPATRI's interdisciplinary issues, the research methodology will combine qualitative and quantitative survey techniques, using both secondary (archives, contemporary grey literature, cadasters, local press articles, online resources) and primary sources (via data collection work directly on species and natural spaces in cities and together with different types of urban dwellers and the authorities in charge of environmental management and urban planning). By combining archival work, botanical inventories, production of geolocalized data, cartographies, and interviews and long-term ethnographic observations, the project borrows from several disciplinary traditions. Finally, our approach is resolutely participatory, based on a "multi-species ethnography" approach that allows us to consider inhabitants and natural elements together in their daily interactions within the urban space.