Urban social sustainability and arboreal lived heritage in a West African capital city

• The longevity of urban cultural landscapes is a result of eco-social functions. • Arboreal urban designs can vividly embody West African cultural capital. • Metropolitan Dakar encapsulates an outstanding richness of tree-related designs. • Dakar’s arboreal designs are a key historic- cum -present-day social phenomenon. • Indigenous settlement designs can leverage urban social sustainability policy. This article traverses three fields of research: social sustainability, cultural heritage, and urban greenspaces in the form of arboreal settlement designs. In terms of geography, it turns the spotlight on West African urban cultural landscapes, with a focus on metropolitan Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. Drawing on secondary sources such as relevant research literature; primary sources such as archival materials and fieldwork in Dakar in 2019 and 2022; and rich visual evidence of past and present – the article provides a qualitative insight into the enduring presence of regional tree-related forms of urban design throughout the ages in Dakar’s metropolitan urban landscape. Despite considerable challenges rooted in colonial and post-colonial urban planning conditions and changing socio-political climates, the enduring viability of these arboreal forms of settlement design since pre-colonial times will be highlighted, from the viewpoint of urban social sustainability. The article also provides an insight into the symbolic representations of these arboreal forms of design and their meaning in a variety of other expressions beyond urban morphology, such as in popular art and media endeavors. The multiplicity of representations of material culture testifies to the persistence, strength and depth of tree-related traditional practices and their modern incarnation in the West African city; to the consistency and relevance of endogenous conceptions of urban cultural heritage; and to the importance of supporting communities’ site-keeping on the part of municipal and regional administrations in order to preserve cultural capital while aiming to pursue a more socially-sustainable urban policy.