Ruderal involutions

An uneven vegetal geography of Coimbatore

Bibliographic Data

ID4464828
AuthorsCharrlotte Adelina (0000-0002-8588-2879, Freie Universität Berlin, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume8
Issue4
Pages1327-1345
Publication date2025-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486251344064
OpenAlexW4410841704
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited63

How can we think and live with vegetal life in uneven urban environments? The paper traces vegetal relations in the streetscapes of Coimbatore, a city that was undergoing urban change through the growth paradigms of smart datafication and beautification. Interviews with street vendors in the beautified streets of the smart city program of Coimbatore pointed to protracted caring relations with avenue trees. By rethinking and bringing together the notion of 'bare life' that has been variously used to denote the lack of political existence of plants and marginalized humans, the paper contends that ruderal involutions alter such understandings. A radical socio-vegetal potentiality is enacted by the fusing of spatial and arboreal politics in the city, where planting and caring for street trees becomes an enactment of more-than-human justice. Advancing the notion of ruderal involutions points us towards a politics that is qualitatively different from solely focusing on the ontic violence imposed on plants. Rather than 'decentering the human' as an antidote to violent relations between and across species divides, what emerges in these narratives is a reclamation of people/plant involutions that further planetary well-being. More-than-human survival benefits from an enlistment in radical ways of organizing, co-conspiring, and solidarity building, as much as their mobilizations reify oppressive and exclusionary regimes of dispossession in the city

Aesthetics · Art · Beautification · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Posthumanism · Ruderal species · Sociology · Solidarity · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Ecology

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