(Q2)A more fleshed out thought in relation to the latent forests of Bombay: During my last week in India in December 2019, I stood on my mother’s 7th floor balcony in the city of Pune watching grey hornbills, kingfishers, monkeys, and snakes traverse the housing society compound. On one side was the bustling Bombay-Bangalore highway, and on the other side was the tekdi – the ridge that runs in a ring all around the city with a dense green canopy at its feet. It struck me then that we have always already been in the forest, while being in the city. Us urbanites, we are unable to recognize the forest in the city, because for us the forest is always elsewhere, away from the city, the forest is where the animals are, it is where the ‘other’ lives, it is not a place for ‘human’ habitation. But the distance between forest and city is not as far as we imagine.

For instance, the Aarey forest is often referred to as a degraded or disturbed forest. It is a forest that is becoming-city right in front of our eyes. What I was seeing from my mother’s balcony was a forest that was a little further ahead in that journey – it had already become-city. There is a lesson to be learned here, especially as we mourn the large swaths of forests across the world that are disappearing before our eyes – whether due to development or drought or forest fires. It seems that forests are present in our lives largely through their absence right now. So how do we cope with this absence? How do we learn to live with it? Perhaps if we think of absence as latency, that gives us an opening. The destruction of the forest does not mean that it has disappeared forever, we have simply turned it into a fugitive forest, a deferred forest, a forest waiting to return, for it knows that it eventually will, given that it operates on time cycles unfathomable to humans. I know this does not reduce the scale of horror and suffering that deforestation causes, but I want to take Prakash’s proposition seriously – for this is as much a time to act, as it is to grieve. And as he reminds us, we must do both/and, not either/or in this moment of crisis – we must both cultivate forests where we can and also resist their destruction.

For the Warlis of Aarey forest, there is no difference between community and ecology – they are both containers for the essential relations that sustain us. One of the biggest lessons I learned from them was that the forest is more than just its trees, rather it is the richness of relations it holds that make it a forest. Perhaps, another way of thinking about cities then, is as impoverished forests. So how can we turn our cities into the forests that are already latent in the landscape? How do we cultivate our ability to sense the latent forest in the city? Film scholar Vivan Sobchack argues that our bodily ability to sense the world is our sense-ability – sensibility or ethics. Our ability to respond to what to we sense, is our response-ability – or ethics. Our future forests are already here; they are hiding in plain sight. Can we see them? Can we hear them? Can we feel them? Can we smell them? And the bigger question is, once we have sensed the latent forest, how will we respond? (laval anuj, 2020) ((cf. phloem n- forestcity/cityforest & u- smart cities, we are sensors ))