Plant-building assemblages and the potential of “ruins”
Thinking through the more-than-human political, affective and socioecological dimensions of the architectures of imperial ruin, across London, Cambodia and the Andaman Islands
Ta Prohm, a 12th-century Buddhist temple located in the historical city of Angkor outside of present-day Siem Reap, in Cambodia, is famously enveloped by large rainforest tree roots that are integral to its iconic visual and affective appeal. Similarly, just across the Indian Ocean, ruins of the buildings in the Ross Island Penal Colony in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have become engulfed by the island’s native trees and vines. What can this slow vegetal disruption of some consciously-arranged order of stone, adobe, brick, or concrete reveal to us? What ways of being that emerge at the fresh, respective intersections of spiritual and colonial placemaking? Architecture, through its material-semiotic ability to terraform living spaces and places, has always been used to create and cement particular socio-cultural and moral economies. As architectural design can cement and privilege certain modes of being and hierarchies of social arrangement, the unsettling of these forms by vegetal life raises questions about the new worlds being birthed and refracted through these plant-building assemblages found across so-called ‘ruins’. As ruins themselves have long been seen as charismatic apocalyptic portents (Myers), this paper presents a provocation to think of world-endings otherwise - away from colonial framings of apocalypse (Mitchell & Chaudhury). By considering the architecture of plant-building assemblages as substrates for new worlds, as a rupture from colonial space-time scales and imaginaries, I offer insights into the co-creative processes that occur in overlooked voids, leftover spaces, and places of ‘decay’ - and explore how they foreshadow emergent orders of being.
Introduction
In the spring of 2021, as the city of London started slowly to emerge out of its third months-long lockdown amid the global Coronavirus pandemic, I went on an excursion a quiet street in the northern part of the city commonly known as Billionaires Row – not far from the ancient shrublands at Hampstead Heath. The Bishops Avenue, as it is officially known, is famously the site of numerous multimillion pound homes. The quiet, almost suburban street contains some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It has housed many of the world’s wealthiest, yet in recent years, it has garnered far more attention not for extravagant homes per se, but the state of abandonment that some of these homes have found themselves in[1]. However, when I talk about this rather sensationalized spectre of abandonment, it is important to clarify that the homes have only been abandoned --- by people --- and that too, remains debatable, as the gaze of onlookers, such as myself, and trespassers, is never too far off. More specifically, these homes remain occupied, by flora and fauna that have trespassed into what were presumably once prized possessions of their owners – among them, infamous tax dodgers, foreign royalty, and business tycoons[2].
Guardian writer Robert Booth has described the area as a “spectacular example of waste and profligacy”[3]. The patches of derelict luxury homes exist interspersed by other buildings of similar stature, many of them lived in and maintained, amidst storeyed landscapes of tax avoidance, a flagrant wealth gap, international political economies, and even murder[4], in the heart of perhaps the most expensive real estate zones in the world. Amidst such material conditions, plants, birds, and other critters have famously found their way into the supposedly-derelict homes of the global economic elite. In contrast to Booth’s characterization of Billionaires Row as an indictment of the worst of global north excess, or perhaps in addition to it, I am more interested in seeing the possibilities in the ways that the agency of plants, in coalition with the buildings, offer, in disrupting exactly the accumulationist orders that epitomise Billionaires Row. Plants, concrete, wood, and other building materials make unlikely allies, yet the spontaneous reordering and co-survivance that they embody reflect an ongoing resistance beyond the human realms in resisting social hierarchies and arrangements of being in relation to the more-than-human. When thinking about these landscapes of affluence, it is important to consider the conspiracies of partners beyond the human. By co-creating a kind of lively vegetally-oriented set of commons that are subversive to the gaze of global capital, plant-building assemblages such as ones found in Billionaires Row offer us portents and portals into the new worlds that emerge just below the threshold of the capitalist gaze.
Sometimes, when one passes by certain homes in Billionaires Row, the building itself is hidden by trees, or other vegetal life in the periphery of the property, adding to a certain mystic, and elusiveness to such already inaccessible places. In others, dead vegetal matter creates a zone of opacity between the street and the interior spaces contained within a property, acting as gatekeepers to the gaze of outsiders. In other still, vines and other plant life crisscross across several properties unperturbed by markers of separation, such as walls or other structures, embodying their agency and flouting capitalist demarcations that privilege human ownership of lands. While for some, the state of dereliction that some houses in Billionaires Row are may render them in the process of ‘ruination’, despite the apparent decrepitude, the property values of such homes do not actually fall. In the context of Billionaires Row, plant life, generally, captures the nature and degree to which built environment structures that capitalist gaze has abandoned (but not, devalued, in the perspective of markets). By attending to plant life in Billionaires Row, one can rather easily trace a topographies of ownership and capital, and correspondingly, how to spurn the same concomitant forces, in the matrix of beings that are attendant to creating the ethos of concentrated wealth that marks the area.
The present epoch, often debatably termed the Anthropocene, is more of a signifier and logical extreme of a combination of centuries of capitalist and colonial expansion and exploitation, rather than an indication that all humans and human communities are equally responsible for the most pressing challenges of climate change. When one faults the entirety of the category of the human for the follies and excesses that go onto produce peculiar geographies like that in Billionaires Row, one renders invisible the violence of capital and settler colonialism and flattens the topographies of power embedded therein. Perhaps, in this context, in the backdrop of one of the most significant political and economic metropoles of a former empire, in the so-called Anthropocene, plant-building assemblages direct us to alternative way of emergence in resistance to either victimization by dominant global orders, or the eschewing or denial of present socio-material conditions and technologies. Just like not all of London’s people and communities are equally responsible for creating the conditions of life and nonlife in Billionaires Row, and its attendant states of simultaneous abandonment, dereliction and overvaluation, the Anthropocene emerges pluralistically in its confluence of biophysical phenomenon, capital and power across landscapes, and not all peoples and communities are equally responsible for these manifestations. Accordingly, plant-people assemblages, as those observed in Billionaires Row, can also become potent partners in exploring the contours of capital, power and natural phenomenon in other contexts, and offer auguries about new worlds being ushered in.
Plant-building assemblages in the Khmer Empire and the British Raj
I first started noticing the poignant ways that plant-building assemblages remake places in areas where a formerly dominant presence of social stratification and hierarchy consequential to imperial ways of being had fallen. The first case was through my visit to Ta Prohm temple, within the Angkor Wat complex, in present-day Cambodia. Built in 12th century, Ta Prohm was one of the most important religious sites in the Khmer empire[5]. Yet, after the decline of the Khmer empire, the temple was abandoned, and over the centuries, plant life grew to submerge much of it. Today, it is most well-known by a Tetrameles nudiflora tree whose roots have crawled into its crevices and foundations[6]. Yet archaeologists and preservationists find that the building remains in somewhat of stable co-existence with the large rainforest tree, despite its elephantine presence on top of it. Others, however, call the term the phenomenon of the plant-building assemblages seen throughout the Angkor temple complex a form of biodeterioration[7], where numerous biological communities colonize the surfaces of the temples in the complex and use it as a substrate to grow and thrive. In its most charismatic, ocular-centric form, it is as if, the trunks of many elephants have wrapped themselves around Ta Prohm to claim it as their own, and today, it is difficult to distinguish where the tree begins and ends from the building and vice versa, as if they have entered into a mutual state of symbiosis.
Several years after my visit to Ta Prohm, I came across the plant-building assemblages at the former site of the Ross Island Penal Colony in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. The settlement in Ross Island (currently known as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Island) included the headquarters of the prison complex where prisoners of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 were jailed, away from the more familiar geographies of the subcontinent’s mainland areas[8]. After its time as a British penal colony, Ross Island changed hands to the Japanese during World War II, when it was used as a bunker, interspersed with decades where it remained disused. Today, the island is part of the Indian union territories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and is a tourist attraction marked by large banyan trees that have engulfed all the colonial buildings, including the prison complex, the headquarters, and the church.
In the cases of both Ta Prohm, and the spectres of plant-building assemblages that have enveloped the whole of Ross Island, the co-survivance of the built environment in coalition with local tropical plant life is a signifier to the end of the respective empires’ ways of being – yet a continuation by another means. As assorted plant life, along with other biological communities, creeped into the disused crevices of these buildings – a phenomenon that archaeologists and preservationists call ‘biodeterioration’ takes places that over time, slowly erodes the structural integrity of built environments[9]. Biodeterioration happens as biological communities, such as plant life, in concert with other environmental agents, such as the climatic conditions, find an optimum circumstance to begin to use the surfaces of built environments as sources for structural support, nutrition and an overall habitat. Anthropocenic forces, as they drive climate change, then, is indubitably a partner in the process of creating plant-building assemblages through biodeterioration[10]. As large-scale global political economies create the conditions for what some call the Anthropocene, the associated changes in the earth’s atmosphere drives the development of new worlds of plant life on top of existing built environments.
One is compelled to ask, what material-semiotic values are embedded in the layers of concrete, brick, stone and other building materials that created the original, intended forms of these structures, that plants are now beginning to inhabit and thrive in? Do they not, in some ways, epitomise and stabilize certain values of empire, whether they be religion, carcerality, racial capitalism, displacement or dispossession? What can then, the slow temporal and spatial unravelling of the concretized elements of imperial built environments signal broadly? Imperial abandonment, like in the case of abandonment by a pervasive capitalist gaze in the examples from Billionaires Row, create potent temporal and spatial ruptures and openings to reanimate spaces in a way to bring forth a reordering of social norms, ways of being and values. Consequently, as the processes of ‘biodeteroriation’, exemplified by plant-building assemblages, make themselves visible to the displaced and the attendant networks and activities that tied them to the larger ways of being under empire, they begin to shift, ever so subtly, the assumed orders of social life in the world at large.
Reframing “ruins”
In geographical and landscape research contexts, there has been a lot of recent scholarship considering the role of ruins in the social imagination, and their profound implications for the changing relationship to space in terms of what it means for those in the role of observer[11]. Thus far, little has been considered from the perspective and agency of the living/non-living hybrid assemblages that create the sites for the so-called ruins under scrutiny. In some ways, there is a subtle anthropocentrism to the approach that many scholars have taken to understand ruins as opposed to treating them as emergent phenomenon themselves that embody agency and being-ness uniquely their own, rather than being mere symptoms of a larger process, such as the Anthropocene, or capitalist expansion, or other socio-technical phenomenon. What happens if one were to treat ruins, often the site of plant-building assemblages like those discussed previously, as not symptoms of processes, but as agential beings themselves are participants or even drivers of such processes? In much of ruin scholarship, the pre-occupation with larger socio-technical-environmental processes underscores a subtle but perceptible anxiety about apocalypse. More specifically, there is a far too much overlap in scholarly literature about ruins and that about apocalyptic imaginaries for this to be a mere coincidence[12]. As Audra Mitchell and I have reflected previously[13], much of the scholarship of apocalypse, catastrophic risk or the broader discourse surrounding ‘decline of civilizations’, and by extension, the landscapes of ruin and the processes of ruination, actually betray an underlying anxiety about threats against whiteness, global north normativities and other dominant ways of being in the world. Accordingly, observer-focused accounts of ruins, and processes of ruination reveal similar anxieties, that act as a distraction from emergent worlds that are based on non-dominant narratives, logics, and mores.
Temporality is a particular element of the reshaping that happens through ruins. As Audra Mitchell and I refer to in our work, and as Kyle Powys Whyte elaborates on[14], the linearity of time is partly what drives the anxiety surrounding apocalypse by those engaged and invested in, dominant modes of social organizing and relationships with the more-than-human worlds that privilege whiteness, capital, empire, patriarchy, Brahminical supremacy and other analytics endowed with logics of socially-constructed difference and subjugation. Plant-building assemblage temporalities work in a place much too “slow” for linear time to observe and refract into multiplicities or even fully encompass. Just as white apocalyptic narratives and frames of analysis detract from and miss out on the richness of Black, Indigenous, people of colour and other analytics of futurisms that displace whiteness as a standard, linear time, and its attended treatment of ruins and ruination, cannot offer portals into the worlds and potentials that are being unravelled, reassessed, and reconfigured in sites of slow “decay”, like plant-building assemblages.
Growing liveable worlds: the built environment as substrate
Natasha Myers, in her provocation, “How to grow liveable worlds: ten not-so-easy steps”, offers multiple ways to decentre the Anthropos that is implied to be behind the so-called Anthropocene and come to live in ways that encourage pluripotent survival and thriving[15]. The provocation situates the Anthropocene as something that is in fact more aptly described as the plantationocene or the capitalocene, rooted in centuries of colonial and capitalist exploitation and dispossession, and calls on us to ally with plants as a way to move forward. The relationship with plants she calls for is not that between observer and subject as would be expected in the Enlightenment tradition of scientific practice, but that of a decolonized plant-oriented sensorium that is about being with, attending to, listening to and sensing with plants as partners. Her final call to action, is to make art with plants that decenter ruin porn – that see futures beyond human extinction. As I have reframed “ruins” as potent portals of plant-building assemblages that reshape world, what can such an alliance and practice look like? As I have shown, plant-building assemblages often signal the end of empires and places beyond capitalist oversight, and plants simply are able to turn these worlds around rather quickly when uninterrupted – and have no problems turning built environments into substrates for a thriving life, their thriving life. So, if one were to start deliberately introducing their plant allies and companions to such substrates in a selective manner, what liveable worlds could we grow, to displace the current dominant world orders and modes of being? What can such plant-based iconoclasm help us achieve?
Conclusion
By de-centering dominant orders of social arrangements and logics under the purview of empire and capital in these disparate landscapes, and seeing decay of the built environment as places for growing liveable worlds otherwise, material-semiotic-vegetal assemblages transect the reductionist framing of capital, placemaking and provide potentials for rupture into thinking of landscape. So-called ruins offer possibilities to be transformed into substrates that resist dominant Anthropocene orders of being. Accordingly, by cultivating long-standing, but often overlooked and undervalued formations between beings of different orders, such as plant-animal assemblages, and the sanctuary they provide for multispecies kin in built environments, one might be able to turn on portals into other ways of being beyond extraction, carcerality, capital and caste – and begin the ends of empire before being noticed by dominant linear time models.
[1] James, “North London Road Known as Billionaire’s Row Crammed with Empty Mansions.”
[2] Bostock, “Money, Murder, and Mystery on London’s Derelict ‘Billionaires’ Row’.”
[3] Booth, “‘Billionaires Row.’”
[4] Bostock, “Money, Murder, and Mystery on London’s Derelict ‘Billionaires’ Row’.”
[5] Castillo et al., “The Khmer Did Not Live by Rice Alone.”
[6] Chandran, Prasad, and Menon, “Structural Behaviour of the Corbelled Vaults of Ta Prohm.”
[7] Caneva et al., “Exploring Ecological Relationships in the Biodeterioration Patterns of Angkor Temples (Cambodia) along a Forest Canopy Gradient.”
[8] Anderson, “Colonization, Kidnap and Confinement in the Andamans Penal Colony, 1771–1864”; Anderson, “The Andaman Islands Penal Colony.”
[9] Mitchell and Clifford, Biodeterioration and Preservation in Art, Archaeology and Architecture.
[10] Caneva, Gori, and Montefinale, “Biodeterioration of Monuments in Relation to Climatic Changes in Rome between 19–20th Centuries.”
[11] DeSilvey and Edensor, “Reckoning with Ruins.”
[12] Bolton, “Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins”; Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity”; Gergan, Smith, and Vasudevan, “Earth beyond Repair”; Huijbens, “The Emerging Earths of Climatic Emergencies”; Latour et al., “Anthropologists Are Talking–About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse”; Stoler, “Imperial Debris.”
[13] Mitchell and Chaudhury, “Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘End’ of ‘the World.’”
[14] Whyte, “Time as Kinship.”
[15] Myers, “How to Grow Livable Worlds.”