For postcolonial cities, formative urban development occurred under colonial domination and focused on exploitation. Urbanist Garth Andrew Myers, author of Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South, writes that “cities were predominantly oriented around the extraction of goods for the metropole.” They were never designed to be sustainable.

Even today, foreign powers shape the development of postcolonial cities in pernicious ways. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is littered with examples of foreign development projects that have caused environmental destruction and left developing nations with untenable debts. From 2015 to 2017, Egypt borrowed $1.03 billion from China to finance infrastructure projects. But much of this recent development has ignored the threat of a warming climate, which is causing temperatures to rise, drought conditions to worsen, and extreme weather events like flash flooding and sandstorms to become more common across the nation.

Informal settlements, home to the cities’ most impoverished and marginalized communities, are the most vulnerable to rising temperatures, ultraviolet radiation, and air pollution. These neighborhoods have multiplied in both Cairo and Dhaka since the turn of the 20th century, and they often lack proper infrastructure and access to green space. “Some areas in informal settlements have zero square meters per inhabitant of green space,” says Abdallah Tawfic, co-founder of Cairo-based organization Urban Greens.

These patterns hold true for many of the Global South’s largest cities. But organizations like Urban Greens as well as Schaduf in Cairo and Green Savers in Dhaka are committed to greening their cities by weaving rooftop gardens into the crowded cityscapes. The inspiration behind their projects is simple: “We don’t have the space to plant trees, but we have 500,000 rooftops capable of taking the load of a rooftop garden,” says Ahsan Rony, founder of Green Savers.

Read the full article about rooftop gardens by Marianne Dhenin at YES! Magazine.