Paper short abstract:

Afforestation techniques that are adopted by non-governmental actors for urban greening projects in Coimbatore rely upon accelerated vegetal growth. The author unpacks the convergences and divergences between the time of the forest, of human aspirations, and the political ambition of urban greening.

Paper long abstract:

I study the politics of naturing Coimbatore city in India, to delineate a lively political ecology of urban forests in India. My work traces current afforestation projects envisioned to ‘save cities’ in the long durée of planetary crisis, and the ways in which it reorders relationships between humans and trees, in a space activated by modalities of entrepreneurial urbanisation, sustainability fixes and more-than-human agencies. I aim to bring together stories of human and more-than-human aspirations in uneven landscapes and their contested politics of place, bringing disparate bodies of work from urban studies and political ecologies into conversation.

In the proposed presentation, I focus on excavating the techniques of close-range afforestation that are presently adopted by non-governmental actors (NGOs) for urban greening projects in Coimbatore. The method relies on accelerating vegetal growth through ecological engineering processes tapping on the ecological concept of inter-species competition. These projects of experimental urbanism not only ally with the project management timeframes of NGOs, but also with the rhythms and policy sprints of ‘fast urbanism’. While they bode well for human actors, speeding up the life cycle of tree growth negatively affect the resultant experiment ecologies. Thus, the presentation will unpack the convergences and divergences between the time of the forest, of the human actors, and of political ambition of greening in an urbanized society.