How to Do Cities with Plants

On January 12, 2024, a team coordinated by the archaeologist Stéphen Rostain and the anthropologist Philippe Descola published an article in Science titled “Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon.”¹ The article reported the discovery, in the Upano Valley of Amazonian Ecuador, of “the largest urban network of erected and excavated features known in Amazonia, whose beginnings date back to 2500 years ago.”² The discovery had enabled the formulation of much more radical hypotheses than those advanced by other archaeologists and anthropologists regarding other monumental sites in the Amazon,³ “which are all more recent, considerably less dense in terms of features, and . . . not embedded in such a vast and dense communication network.”⁴ The testimonies of the Upano Valley, by contrast, “materialized another scale of landscape anthropization, where urbanism covers hundreds of square kilometers⁵—not only buildings with complex geometries but an extremely intricate network of roads and connections between what seem to be autonomous villages.

The paradox Rostain and his colleagues formulated is quite simple yet overwhelming. The Amazon forest—which we consider the most natural and wild space we know, the cradle of planetary biodiversity—is one of the most radical and enduring expressions of urban culture. This is not an instance of natural ecological succession; the forest is not a post-apocalyptic reconfiguration in which trees have invaded the space of a vanished human civilization. On the contrary, the forest is an ultra-historical form of the city: a city that has transcended the boundaries of the culture and species that created it and become intrinsically transcultural.

This idea should not come as a surprise: Nearly 400 ethnic groups that we know of have settled in the Amazon forest over thousands of years. And yet, the resistance to recognizing the identity between city and forest seems almost atavistic. The very word forest—which we still use to describe a stable and enduring spatial association of diverse tree species—etymologically connotes exclusion from the urban. It derives from the Latin foris, meaning outside: The forest is that which lies beyond the city, a space presumed to contain things nonhuman, without history, and untouched by artificiality.⁶ Yet for at least a century, anthropology has repeated that things are not really so. Beginning with archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe’s controversial book Man Makes Himself,⁷ it has been widely accepted that the urban revolution was a consequence of the invention of agriculture. For millennia, humans lived in nomadic, hunter-gatherer groups, staying in one place for a few days or weeks, then migrating elsewhere, like birds or wolves. Then something happened, suddenly, to make them stop their wandering. Probably the first human groups didn’t even notice, but something changed. Someone must have fallen in love with some plants. And it is precisely this crazy and inexplicable love, the sense of obligation to remain faithful to a relatively small number of trees and shrubs, that first suggested the idea of building cities.

This love for beings far from us from a biological point of view that forced us to exchange our most precious good—spatial mobility to explore the world—with the care of these beings who do not speak, do not move, and constantly grow and change shape. We humans have borrowed our way of life of the last few thousand years from species belonging to another kingdom: Ultimately, this moral hybridization—which has changed customs but not necessarily anatomy—is more important than anything else in human history.

In reflecting on this ethnographic evidence, then, we find two counterintuitive ideas. The first is that the garden invented the city and not vice versa. That is, only by cultivating plants—by establishing lasting relationships over time with them—did the human species invent our greatest and most enduring artifact or work of art: the city. The garden is not the temporary interruption of the urban fabric, it is its spatial and temporal origin; the Big Bang from which, millennia ago, Boston and Dakar, Beijing and Rome, Sydney and Tokyo were born. 

The second idea is that the invention of the city arose from a very strange form of love—a crazy and inhuman declaration of love and fidelity to plant life. One could say that the city is a form of bovarism or taking oneself for someone one is not, believing in an identity not one’s own. Each time we decide to found or live in cities, we humans mistake ourselves for plants, adopting their way of inhabiting space, their rootedness and quiet fidelity to one place. Having a home or thinking that our place is tied to a tiny plot of land, that our identity depends on a piece of soil and not on the sky that welcomed us, that we have roots: None of these feelings are particularly human. They are the result (or the sick consequence) of this strange marriage with plants that we celebrated thousands of years ago.

Biologists have long noted that we owe many things to trees. It was in the tree canopies that our primate ancestors learned to oppose the thumb and developed forward-facing eyes to perceive depth. Trees sculpted our bodies. But the city is a cultural gift from plants, not an anatomical one. After all, humans are the only animal species to have woven such a deep cultural relationship with the plant kingdom; we do not limit ourselves to eating and using plants, to building objects with their bodies, to dressing with their corpses. We are also the only form of animal life that has culturally vegetalized itself. Like in a Grimm fairy tale, we have married plants and had children: Even if we want to divorce, we remain bound to them for life. Like all love stories, even this one is full of tensions, quarrels, pettiness, tragedies, and disapproval—from relatives, friends, strangers, priests of all religions, casual spectators, and even, notably, anthropologists. Paul Shepard shamelessly considered farming an “ecological disease”⁸ par excellence, the cause of all the evils that the human species has inflicted on itself and the world. James Scott echoed this idea, arguing that in adopting agriculture, Homo sapiens “entered an austere monastery whose taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants.”⁹ In effect, these anthropologists cry: “This marriage must not take place!”

These conclusions rest on three assumptions. First, that hunters are more human than farmers, because adapting to plant life is a form of constraining nature. Second, that biological kingdoms are morally impermeable: Animals must live as animals, plants must live as plants. There cannot and must not be common life between them. 

The third assumption is that cultural and identity mixing is a bad thing. But in reality, no species can avoid conceiving of and producing itself through the models of other species. One of Darwin’s key insights is that all species are collages of other species. We are inherently biodiverse multispecies. Likewise, every anthropomorphic act is not only a projection of one’s identity onto other species, but also an alienation of that identity: When we say that plants think, we not only humanize the plant, we also vegetalize thought.

We must therefore overturn the famous principle formulated by the Jesuit and architectural theorist Marc-Antoine Laugier in the eighteenth century: “Il faut regarder la ville comme une forêt” (“One must look at the city as a forest”).¹⁰ Instead, I propose we look at the forest as if it were a city and try to examine the consequences evident in such a reversal: Our cities are the illegitimate children of forbidden love between human beings and plants—bastard, hybrid, ambiguous figures who, like all children, bear the virtues of both parents. 

The most important consequence is that our relationship to plants—whether through agriculture, horticulture, farming gardening or phytophilia—is not a tangential urban fact. It is the original urban fact, the premise and form of all cities. Urbanism is originally a vegetal reality, coinciding with a process of mutual domestication in which human beings and some plant species choose to become each other’s “home” (domus). To create a city, it is necessary to have married the plants and therefore to become theirs and vice versa, allowing them to domesticate us.

Before continuing, however, it is necessary to clear up a common misunderstanding. Domestication is often interpreted as a unilateral and violent imposition of human will upon other species. But this perspective has been rejected by numerous recent studies that show the problematic nature of such views.¹¹ To claim that domestication is solely the product of human intention is to grant humans a power they do not actually possess. It is not possible to domesticate all species, only those that actively contribute to the construction of a genuine cohabitation contract. More fundamentally, this view denies that other species possess agency in relation to humans and other living beings. We must recognize not only “the active role played by animals in approaching humans and in looking for benefits resulting from human proximity and interaction,”¹² but also the fact that domestication and agriculture are not exclusively human. They are co-evolutionary patterns, widespread in nature. Thus, the process of domestication of plant species, which we call agriculture, is less univocal and uniform than we tend to imagine. 

Historical ecology research on the Amazon region allows us to broaden our perspective on this point.¹³ Historical ecology shows that “rather than domesticating the species they exploited,” the vast majority of Amazonian populations “domesticated the landscape.”¹⁴ A wide range of ecological engineering techniques has made it possible to transform the common territory of humans, plants, and animals in a way that promotes species richness and density.¹⁵ These landscaping and land-management technologies, which focus on populations rather than individuals, or on individuals without seeking to make them identical to their surroundings, are in fact also characteristic of Europe’s ecological past.¹⁶ It is therefore important to recognize urban formations as one of the possible forms of ecological transformation of the territory, which always and necessarily involves other species as well.

When considering the domestication of the territory, the dichotomy between farming and hunting becomes less relevant. And even that between city and countryside proves illusory. The countryside is not the opposite of the city, but a reduced and rarefied form of it: It is a technique for interspecific association in which everything is subject to control. In addition to the number of people and stones, we must also conceive how many plants should exist, which ones, how fast they should grow, and so on. The Amazon forest is in this sense much closer to the contemporary megalopolis—to a technology of engineered congestion and excess of density that make any control strictly impossible—than to the interspecies police we have called “countryside.” Also for this reason, the solution to climate change is not to replace cities with the countryside, but to design cities more radically: to extend the culture of urban congestion to a culture of congestion of species density and biodiversity. Like the Amazon forest, future cities must become a sort of magnet for members of the plant kingdom that allows them to domesticate us.

What the urban complex of the Upano Valley—and more broadly, the history of Amazonian ethnic groups —reminds us is that marriage is the love that endures the test of time. Stepping outside the metaphor, the equation between forest and city is a cultural fact, not a natural one; one that becomes thinkable only when we introduce a temporal dimension. The urban complexes of the Upano Valley demonstrate that the life of a city must never be reduced to the expression of a single human culture. Because cities are always born as an association between the human species and plants, they come to express, over time and space, something more than a simple ethnic and cultural heritage. They remind us that the nature of the megalopolis is always transcultural and transethnic, because it is always transspecific.

Precisely because every city arises from multispecies and multikingdom associations, precisely because it is a transethnic project from the outset, its cultural differentiation should be conceived in ethnobotanical or ethnozoological terms rather than in purely urban ones. If, contrary to what the architect Aldo Rossi thought,¹⁷ the original urban fact is not the form imprinted on a mineral substrate but the relationship (often invisible but no less real) between taxonomically distinct forms of life. And if the city is  more urban the more numerous the relationships it has with other species, then it is precisely the number, diversity, and forms of these relationships that diversify the nature of cities. 

That is why, rather than continuing to use spatial metaphors, we should start using horticultural metaphors and talking about cities as a form of grafting. This is what architect Jeanne Gang recently proposed in her amazing book The Art of Architectural Grafting: the city Is a technology of interspecies grafting.¹⁸ The practice of grafting is extraordinarily common—arguably, we couldn’t drink wine if it weren’t for grafting—but extremely dizzying from a biological point of view. First of all, grafting is proof that life can circulate in genetically and taxonomically different bodies: Life is capable of nourishing two bodies that are completely different in species, form, genealogy, and origin. It demonstrates that the problem is not a lack of space, but the continuity of circulation.

The city is this innovation: To increase species density, we have abandoned the practice of living in a stable ecosystem and grafted ourselves onto other bodies. Planetary life has rid itself of ecosystems. If the city (and grafting) transcends the idea of the ecosystem, it is because in every graft the future is not the natural and gradual evolution of the past, but the insertion into the present of something that has nothing to do with the past or the present. Life explodes and becomes better (like wine, the taste of life improves because of grafting) when lives that are not identical are mixed, producing bizarre, somewhat unnatural hybrids.

The idea of grafting also allows us to go beyond the idea of repair. Grafting means pruning: It means being aware that sometimes the best way to prolong life is not to restore to its original form something that is broken, but to introduce something new, unexpected, and contextually heterogeneous. What we have called modernity, after all, has been a specific form of transcultural, transtemporal, and transgeographical grafting; for example, what Brunelleschi did in Renaissance Florence was precisely an operation of grafting the past of a distant and dead culture (the Greek-Roman one) onto the Gothic present. Every city is a practice of multispecific grafting that has forever changed the balance of life on this planet. That is why there can be nothing “natural” about our relationship with plants. This marriage has made us more artificial, more complex. 

When one partner changes, a real marriage can last only if that person helps the other person change too. Cities have changed us, and at this point, it’s hard to say if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But we don’t have any other choice now but to help plants love us for who we are, to get to where they’ve taken us. It’s not easy to figure out how to do that. 

Perhaps one way of growing together with plants is by making our technologies accessible to other species. To understand how, we could consider the Belgian pavilion of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, designed by landscape architect Bas Smets and botanist Stefano Mancuso.¹⁹  They introduced a series of tropical trees into the Giardini building and they then connected them to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows them to decide independently on the regulation of all climatic factors according to their needs. Plants could therefore decide whether it should rain, how much light they should have, what pH creates optimal soil, etc. It would be wrong to compare this experiment to a simple improved greenhouse or what since Frits Went has been developed.²⁰ It is not a question of controlling the life of plants in a greenhouse to optimize production. It is, at least ideally, a question of giving them dominion over the domestic space. The pavilion is, in fact, a sort of reproduction of the classic villa model. But rather than opening the architecture to the outside, now it is the outside that enters the inside and takes control of domestic life, transforming the entire house into a threshold. It is, at least metaphorically, about recognizing that plants must now be our “landlords.”

If, as Mancuso and other botanists have demonstrated,²¹ plants are intelligent, the purpose of connecting them to artificial intelligence was not to improve their cognitive performance. Rather, the purpose was to—for the first time—make the most advanced technology we have created usable by and available for plants. It is as if we have opened the black box, provided the access codes and passwords, and made our source code transparent to nonhuman organisms. 

This approach, albeit speculative, offers three important ideas. The first is that to resolve the disparity created by this excessive identification with plants, we cannot leave the city. We cannot heal our relationship with plants by re-creating a “wild” space where they live among themselves without us. Our marital duties oblige us to a commitment that even divorce cannot undo. The second is that we have to change our idea of technology. A good model for doing so is offered by the well-known mythology of the Pokemon. Pokemon are natural creatures—like fabulous animals or forest spirits—with incredible powers. Children are their trainers, and in order to bond with them, they need an array of high-tech devices: pokédex, bracelets and, most importantly, poké balls. It’s a quite interesting fusion of high-tech and shamanism. The core message of these mangas is quite clear: Technology exists not to defend us or keep us away from forests, rivers, fungi, animals, bacteria, or storms, but to connect us and allow us to interact with the more spiritual side of these phenomena. 

Technology enables a spiritual relationship with the world, and there is no way to establish a spiritual relationship with other living things without inventing an artifact that makes visible the spirit captured in matter. We must stop making animism a characteristic of certain cultures against others; in doing so, we are perpetuating a serious colonial prejudice. We must also stop dividing technologies (and cultures) based on their geography; in doing so, we are naively and dangerously translating the ancient doctrine that reduces culture to a purely local and territorial fact. All technologies are always the result of exchange and encounter; no technologies have ever stopped circulating; no technologies belong to a single people or private heritage. We must learn to see technology as a spiritual fact.

Technology must cease to be a black box in the hands of a single species. It must become a planetary common: a resource of the Earth that is available and accessible to everyone. The same applies (and above all) to AI; these devices are mechanisms that allow us to project a form of human and superhuman intelligence onto stones. We could say that even stones now think, and everyone must have access to this mineral intelligence.

We must invite our nonhuman partners to play with our favorite toy. We are the fathers of cities, and plants are the mothers. They have every right to live alongside their children.