Ruderal involutions: An uneven vegetal geography of Coimbatore

Abstract

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.