Regeneration and medicinal plant conservation in the City of Johannesburg in partnership met rsearcher and Songoma Nolwazi Mbongwa.
21 June 2022

A transdisciplinary conservation project unlocking adaptation through participation

Green spaces create healthier cities. Urbanisation without mindful green space development produce unfavourable public spaces . Our city, like most around the world today have a lot of concrete which causes various climate change related problems such as the heat island effects and floods. This creates an opportunity to invent some adaptive infrastructural technologies to ‘soften’ the concrete jungle with plants. This intervention creates opportunity for collaborations with medicinal markets and traditional healers to grow medicinal plants vertically, cooling the city walls down with plants that have socio-cultural significance with inhabitants.

This proposed intervention prioritises the conservation of hardy medicinal rock succulents which have been harvested out of the wild. While the rock succulents grow to establish themselves in the WildWall tiles, the growers who care for the plants connect and interconnect with diverse stakeholders. The opportunity this intervention creates is intended unify stakeholders, which have been tested with a pilot installation at Kwa Mai-Mai. The vertical gardens these rock succulents create are mimicked from the wild, where these plants flourish with constraints of water and warm rocky outcrops.  The colours of the plants can gently guide passers-by, filter the air, and be harvested and sold at the muthi markets when the plants mature.