Re-thinking species collectives with "ruins": the case of Cottonopolis

Abstract

ABSTRACT

While processes of ruination can help understand urban ecologies and make sense of today’s urban nature, ruins as dynamic entities rather than objectified matters are still absent from ecological narratives. By engaging with the urban ruins of 19th century Manchester, known as Cottonopolis – that was paradoxically a botanical field of study and site of pleasurable excursions while transforming as an industrial city of polluting mass production – architectural, botanical, environmental, and legal entangled stories of unnoticed but constructed urban ruin are unravelled. However, these stories are narrated by plants as witnesses of the city’s industrial ruination. The research draws on a multidisciplinary archival material, aiming to disentangle the colonial practice and knowledge underlying ruination indicated by native and neophyte plants. The archival findings speculate on the legal rights of urban nature and its collaborative agency with the nonhuman ruin in a historical context in which theories of ecology, multispecies justice and posthumanism were non-existent. This contemporary re-reading of 19th century Manchester will allow first the construction of a just eco-historical narrative of the ruin in its architectural discourse and beyond, and then, potentially to ideate on ways of bringing together practices and disciplines to provide future ruins with epistemic ecological agency.