Author: Carolina Némethy and Miguel da Cruz

Resilience Through Urban Weeds

This article is written in collaboration with Miguel da Cruz, a visiting student from Brazil.

Weeds are often found in the nooks and crannies of the cities and infrastructures built and paved by humans. However, the inevitable collapse of these human structures begins with the tiny fissures and cracks that open for possibilities of the unruly. An asphalt road is maintained and renewed around every two decades. If not maintained on a regular basis, cracks and potholes appear. Once completely abandoned, the cracks multiply, weeds colonize the interstices and eventually consume the infrastructure. Just as roads obstruct the mycelium networks of mushrooms that allow them to spread, and take time to grow, roads take time to be maintained while the Earth on which they are built is continuously in motion, resisting humans’ rigid structures.

Weeds both plant and human

Miguel da Cruz, a visiting exchange student from northeastern Brazil engages with and coordinates ‘rewilding’ collectives in urban environments in Brazil. He tells a story that allows us to unearth the unruliness or weediness across the globe. In a city such as Campinas in which he resides, a place consumed by what we could call landscapes of colonialism and late industrialism, where the once rich and complex mesh of tropical forest is now reduced to some small patches along the city’s neglected rivers and streams, and between highly urbanized areas, degraded cattle pastures and monocrop fields, it may seem difficult at first glance to perceive what can grow in the interstices of infrastructure. He says, if only we knew where and how to look, we would find that the city is under a constant process of rewilding, occurring with or without human intervention. The weeds pose an everlasting disclaimer: they will eventually reclaim, multiply, and repopulate, calling prior neighbors back to land.

As weeds, both plants and humans inhabit and embody landscapes of urban residue, nurturing livable spaces of community gardens amidst the rubble of urban life. Weeds serve as a metaphor here. This not about the romanticization of human-plant relations, as if the urban outcasts will naturally reclaim their once lost territories despite the structures of power keeping them at bay. Rather, it is to show how humans and plants become allies in political resilience through practices of food sovereignty, housing, and environmental regeneration.

Miguel collaborates with artist Giovanna Poletto in depicting anthropomorphized plants native to Campinas in a children’s book, Caderno Das Plantas Esquecidas (which translates to Notebook of Forgotten Plants). These pictures are of the urban weeds that sprout from the pavements and roadsides where they are often unnoticed. By giving them a human face, they attempt to bridge the human and plant world. It is striking how the human element of the plant drawings acts to bring the weeds to a state of recognition. This is a stark contrast to the 1970s New York zines’ somewhat derogatory depiction of ‘plant people’ as humans with plant faces, dehumanizing urban dwellers’ ‘unhealthy’ obsession with plants, in which plants are considered lower forms of life. Rather, it depicts the human-plant relation as co-constitutive, such as we encounter in traditional medicines for instance, where plants are literally consumed by and act on human bodies.  

Weeds that literally embody the human

Traditional medicines have long been used by humans throughout the world. In a country like China, there is a coexistence of local, minority medicines as well as the larger and widespread, institutionalized Traditional Chinese Medicine. Towards the end of my first stay in China in 2016, I travelled to Xishuangbanna in the borderland, southwestern Yunnan province. As a borderland, it is part of what James Scott referred to as Zomia, a mountainous region spanning southwest China and several countries across southeast Asia. This area has been discussed in terms of its unruliness where, historically, highland groups escaped wealthy lowlanders’ control and sought refuge in the forested mountains. I followed a group of foragers who would gather medicinal plants, mushrooms, and foods from the patches of wilderness between rubber plantations.

Plantations, like urban spaces, are scaled by humans, for humans. The weeds, however, offered interstices of escape, while nourishing lives and livelihood. Some of the weeds were also sold as medicinal herbs. It is these weeds that not only occupy but demarcate wild ‘patches’. Whether it be on a hill, a parking spot, the side of a building, a plantation, a crack in the pavement or accompanying a potted flower, weeds escape the territories mapped, controlled and scaled by humans, for humans. Like the highlanders of Zomia, these medicinal plants escape control while occupying unchartered space.

On a more recent fieldtrip to China, I accompanied students of Traditional Chinese Medicine on a hike to a mountain in Hangzhou where they learned to identify medicinal herbs in the wild. Before we even reached the mountain, the teacher rushed up to a seemingly unnoticeable plant growing in the car park. Although the car park was not itself wild, the patches of weeds were wild in their unruliness. They were unruly in their occupation of car park degradation. The aim of the field trip was to go up the mountain, which we eventually did. However, it surprised me how many plants growing in the interstices of pavements and walls were recognized as useful, while simultaneously anarchic. There seems to be a contradiction in how the unruly life of weeds provides medicines for a national institution, whereby nations are usually defined by structures, rather than interstices.

Re-envisioning Approaches to Weeds

The two contexts presented here reveal the co-constituent relation between humans and weeds. As an embodiment of the unruly, weeds resist rigidity. On the one hand, weeds are the killjoys of a lingering colonial past, eagerly sprouting up in protest to reclaim land. On the other hand, weeds are themselves consumed by the very structures they disrupt from within. As such, we re-envision weeds as productive drivers of change that are as much plant as they are human.