Paper Short Abstract:

This paper offers a glimpse into the contested spaces in and between San Francisco’s sidewalk gardens. Tracing how their human and vegetal inhabitants chart new trajectories through these sites, following lines that may be inaccessible or invisible, I advocate for methodologies of not knowing.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the crevices and margins of San Francisco’s sidewalk gardens, this paper engages ‘hostile’ garden architectures and the humans and plants that continually re-map and re-purpose them. Re-charting San Francisco’s garden planters ‘according to their own competencies and rhythms,’ tactical performances enacted by and with plants demand attunement to forms of spatial intervention that flourish in different timescales and terrains– gestating beneath the surface and becoming visible only in dramatic moments of rupture (Barua 2023: 4; Marder 2013: 103). Present one day and absent the next, plant tactics, like all tactics, are ‘fugitive’ and fleeting, ‘contingent’ on brief opportunities, small lapses, and unlikely ‘alliances’ with ‘various human and nonhuman actors that are simultaneously benefited or empowered’ by their presence (Marder 2013: 28; Robbins 2004: 146; De Certeau 1984). Lingering in San Francisco’s transient corridors and alleyways against the grain, sitting alongside planters while sketching their inhabitants, I gradually learn to spot these tactical interventions which so often leave only subtle impressions that haunt these sites in their wake. Thriving in ‘darkness and obscurity’, partially concealed beneath the soil, plant tactics call for approaches that similarly accept ambiguity and mystery– demanding methodologies of not knowing (Marder 2013: 30). Choosing to study and depict plants without uprooting them to reveal that which remains hidden in the subterrene, both in the literal and figurative sense, this paper draws on anthropologies ‘of ignorance’ as an ethical framework for engaging plants without capturing or confining them (Mair, Kelly & High 2012).