( Q1 – Quote 1 )Thinking of the city as a latent forest – Latency «shows up» as deferred action or as hidden potential. If he project is about imprinting the city with the forest, or rather the forest on the city, so that it might develop into one eventually – the forest is always already there, just latent. In regards to Bombay futures, cf. gaming/participatory performance series which is entirely about rewilding the city, encouraging its latent forests to return. (laval anuj, 2020)
( C1 – Commentary 1)
Forests are latent properties/manifestations of many cities. Latency might be a more accurate description of the relation of forestcity to city. Many cities will express their forest, it is just a matter of time and how will the humans and other animals help. (drum duskin,*, 2020)
(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 ))
(C2)The historical-dialectical matter is pure utopia, is the world’s substratum (unfinished, inmanent, latent); a subtratum being baked by the dialectic fire of its own process. And being done in the same «what/which» self-dertermined intended laboratory, ultimately pending, of all our matter. Only that way has matter its own organizational process through life, consciousness, binding history, and works that make present the full-sense specter: a matter that remains open onwards. The quest for matter is the problem of «what/which» of human content, and at the same time the content of a nature that cosmically involves us rather than only supports us. Man and possibility. How is himself possible? Man is only possible if its world has a substratum of open possibilities, available, latent. No proces is simply possible without a creative and utopian matter of this sort. (Bloch, E. (1964): Utopia-matter arch)
(Q3)In terms of my own genealogy in getting to latency, I want to point to Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the world – where she talks about the latent commons. And I’m also interested in exploring latency as fugitivity via the undercommons, following Moten and Harney – not yet manifest for it is in hiding. (laval anuj, 2020)
(Q4) forest stories in a new magazine about ecology and spirituality – Emergence – that is being produced out of northern california:
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-church-forests-of-ethiopia/
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/sanctuaries-of-silence-podcast/
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/111-trees/
(C4a) https://www.archdaily.com/775884/baubotanik-the-botanically-inspired-design-system-that-creates-living-buildings?ad_medium=gallery (( cf.Phloem F- Landscape Arch/ Green Roofs and walls)
(C4a.1) NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy – the last book has a whole world built through plant-architecture.
(C4b) could such islands be made in cities? we need to think of wildlife corridors connecting these islands as well – for these forest fragments are turning into carceral spaces for animals that require large migration areas – and in the long run they become impoverished in terms of their biodiversity.