Chuma Mbambo-Lado first visited Katowice in 2024 during Climate Week, organised as part of the European City of Science, during which she spoke to students about climate adaptation in cities and creating equitable communities. A year later, she returned to Katowice as a special guest of the 9th Silesian Science Festival to explain to a wider audience how appropriate urban policies and local community actions can help reduce climate vulnerabilities between different groups. Chuma is an urban researcher affiliated with Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. A week before the Festival, we had the opportunity to talk more about the JUSTGREEN project, which also includes Katowice. Chuma, a project expert, talked about effective ways of dealing with climate change in cities.
Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk: Is a city with equal access to green spaces and satisfied residents still an unattainable ideal, or are there any existing examples worth following?
Chuma Mbambo-Lado: I have yet to encounter a city where residents or city officials would describe it as perfectly green or free of inequality, even when they speak with pride about the place they live. This reflects a broader reality: greening and climate justice remain ongoing challenges everywhere.
With that being said, there are some interesting solutions that we are seeing, for example, within the JUSTGREEN project. As part of this project, we work with seven cities supported by Interreg Europe. These include Rotterdam, where I live and work and which acts as the lead partner, alongside Katowice, Tallinn, Murcia, Burgas, Ghent, and the Attica Region. Although these cities differ greatly in context, climate, and governance, they are all taking steps towards fairer approaches to greening. These efforts seek to reflect the lived realities of residents, including their needs and vulnerabilities, while enabling meaningful participation in shaping climate adaptation measures.
The aim of the initiative is to support cities in strengthening their greening and climate adaptation strategies in ways that are fair and inclusive, and that are grounded in local histories, heritage, and political contexts. Particular attention is given to ensuring that the perspectives of communities most affected by environmental and climate-related challenges are recognised.
A key part of this work involves supporting the exchange of experiences between cities through transdisciplinary methods, allowing them to learn from one another. These cities are at very different stages in their greening journeys and in how residents perceive progress. For this reason, it would be misleading to describe any single city as a model to be followed. That said, there are many inspiring initiatives across the partnership. Katowice is a particularly interesting case, as it continues to navigate a transition from a coal-based industrial past towards a more sustainable and environmentally oriented urban future.
Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk: Have you noticed any particularly noteworthy initiatives aimed at creating eco-friendly and resident-friendly spaces in any of the cities covered by the JUSTGREEN project?
Chuma Mbambo-Lado: A few months ago, we visited Burgas in Bulgaria, where the city implemented a particularly interesting initiative. An underused asphalted space next to a hospital, previously associated with waste storage, was transformed into what is referred to as an urban healing island. The site is now a green area that combines nature-based solutions with features designed to support health and well-being, including spaces for light physiotherapy with sensory elements such as sound. Locating such space next to a hospital and linking greening directly to well-being makes it a compelling example of context-sensitive climate adaptation.
Another strong example comes from Rotterdam through the OpzoomerMee initiative, which is led by local residents with support from the municipality. Community members receive small budgets to organise greening activities, such as removing paving stones from front gardens and planting trees. These activities increase green cover and improve rainwater infiltration, while also enabling residents to work together and shape their own streets.
Katowice offers a similar approach through its Citizen Budget, which allows residents to propose and vote on local greening projects, with municipal funding allocated to selected initiatives. In all three cases, the projects combine environmental benefits with resident involvement, illustrating how greening can support both climate adaptation and procedural justice.
Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk: Katowice, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Mexico City – cities around the world face different challenges, such as increasingly severe flooding, greater pollution, or difficult political situation. Given these diverse conditions, depending on their location on the map, are there any universal and tried ways to improve the quality of city life?
Chuma Mbambo-Lado: There is no universal formula for creating an environmentally sustainable city, but there are clear principles that can guide how cities approach greening and climate adaptation. In the JUSTGREEN project, we use the three pillars of justice as such a guide: recognitive, procedural, and distributive justice.
Recognitive justice asks cities to understand their specific greening and climate context by acknowledging that residents experience climate challenges differently, depending on their backgrounds, values, and capacities. This matters because cities operate in very different environmental and social conditions. I come from South Africa, where climate realities differ significantly from those in cities such as Katowice. Even cities that are geographically close may require very different solutions. Understanding local context is therefore the starting point for any meaningful intervention.
Procedural justice then focuses on how decisions are made. It concerns the design of inclusive processes that allow residents, community organisations, and other stakeholders to meaningfully shape greening and adaptation strategies. Too often, cities adopt solutions from elsewhere without involving those who live with the consequences. When recognitive and procedural justice are overlooked, even well-intentioned projects risk failing in practice.
The third pillar, distributive justice, addresses how the benefits and burdens of greening are shared. This includes prioritising neighbourhoods that lack green space or have been historically disadvantaged or exposed to environmental harm. Directing resources to areas with greater needs can deliver more just and effective climate outcomes.
Rather than searching for universal solutions, this approach emphasises shared principles and a careful understanding of local needs as the basis for fair and effective climate adaptation.
Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk: Some towns and cities have existed for hundreds of years, and today it is often difficult to introduce major changes in an economical way that is not too disruptive for residents. Despite this, do such places have a chance to join the green revolution?
Chuma Mbambo-Lado: I believe this is very possible. Ghent offers a clear example of how a city with a history of intensive industrial and port activity can gradually transform itself into a greener urban environment. An important turning point was a policy shift in the late 1980s that prioritised environmental considerations. This enabled the city to acquire land, work more strategically with private developers, and introduce regulations that required environmental concerns to be integrated across municipal activities. While larger projects, such as the creation of new parks, have played a role in improving biodiversity, change has also been driven by smaller-scale interventions that matter directly to residents. Initiatives such as home gardens and neighbourhood greening projects do not require long planning cycles, yet they can have a tangible impact. Cities rarely change overnight, but these incremental decisions can create a cumulative effect, allowing urban environments to evolve in more sustainable and just ways over time.
Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk: I feel that sometimes residents may feel helpless, especially when the city takes action without prior consultations. What can citizens who want change but live in political conditions that are less conducive to grassroots initiatives do?
Chuma Mbambo-Lado: This remains a challenging issue for many cities. A key starting point is whether residents feel connected to, and able to influence, the places where they live. Participation in greening and climate adaptation is shaped by many factors, but a common barrier is the perception that residents’ views do not matter. When people see themselves as passive recipients rather than active contributors, engagement in climate action remains limited.
Many cities are trying to encourage residents to become more involved in shaping greener and more climate-resilient neighbourhoods. Where municipalities demonstrate that they value residents’ perspectives and actively seek their input, people are more willing to participate and share their experiences of climate risks and everyday conditions. Yet in practice, governance often remains top down, leaving little room for meaningful influence. From a climate justice perspective, the aim should be to build healthy relationships between citizens, governments, and community institutions, based on cooperation and mutual recognition of knowledge.
At present, expert and institutional knowledge is still frequently valued more highly than the everyday knowledge of residents. While scientific expertise is essential for climate adaptation, it is necessarily partial. Residents hold detailed, experience-based knowledge of their neighbourhoods, including where heat stress, flooding, or environmental burdens are most acutely felt. When adaptation and greening decisions fail to recognise this, residents are left without real influence over outcomes. Ensuring fair, transparent, and inclusive decision-making processes in climate adaptation and urban greening is therefore central to procedural justice and to achieving just climate outcomes.
Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk: In your academic work, you focus primarily on European and South African cities. Do you see any significant differences between them in terms of their approach to building green communities and responding to the needs of residents?
Chuma Mbambo-Lado: There are differences, but they are less about ambition and more about context. European and South African cities operate within very different historical, social, and institutional environments, which shape how greening and climate adaptation are approached.
In European cities, greening initiatives are often embedded within formal planning systems and long-term policy frameworks, which can support consistency and coordination over time. In South African cities, approaches are more strongly shaped by pressing social needs and uneven urban development, which means that greening is often closely linked to questions of access, safety, and everyday survival.
What is striking is that both contexts place increasing emphasis on resident involvement, though this takes different forms. European cities can learn from the ways South African cities draw on community knowledge and informal networks, while South African cities can benefit from the institutional mechanisms European cities use to support long term environmental planning. Rather than one model being preferable, each offers insights that are valuable for building greener and more responsive cities.
Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk: Thank you for the interview.
Interviewer: Weronika Cygan-Adamczyk
Photos: private archive, Radek Struzik