From an African urban perspective, EC(h)OTONING offers a way of understanding cities not as collections of discrete sectors, infrastructures, or territories, but as places where multiple systems continually meet and transform one another. In this context, the notion of (thick edges) becomes particularly important. Rather than viewing edges as fixed boundaries separating people from nature, formal from informal systems, or planned from unplanned spaces, (thick edges) draw attention to the relational spaces where these distinctions become blurred and negotiated.

Across many African cities, urban waste systems reveal these (thick edges) with particular clarity. Rivers become conduits for waste and sites of community stewardship. Landfill buffer zones become spaces of livelihood, environmental risk, and informal settlement. Streets function simultaneously as routes of mobility, spaces of commerce, and sites of material recovery. Waste itself moves across households, municipalities, informal economies, ecosystems, and global value chains, refusing the neat institutional boundaries through which cities are often governed.

Our regional understanding of EC(h)OTONING therefore emerges from engaging with waste not simply as a technical challenge of collection and disposal, but as a wicked urban problem that exposes broader questions of governance, justice, health, livelihood, infrastructure, and belonging.