From undead commodities to lively labourers: (re)valuing vegetal life, reclaiming the power to design-with plants

Concepts of “gestion différenciée”, “gestion harmonique” and “zéro phyto” are ubiquitous in Francophone urban green space management. Sparked by changes in legislation, innovations in landscape architecture, and the diversification and intensification of park usages, all insist on the need to let go of dominant “horticultural” approaches to urban parks, and instead experiment with “rural”, “wasteland”, or “wild” aesthetics and forms of “ecological” management. They involve both new ways of designing vegetal landscapes and of engaging with the spatialities and temporalities of plant life in everyday maintenance work. In this essay, I draw on research conducted in Geneva (Switzerland) to examine the forms of enrolment of plant life that respectively undergird the horticultural and ecological traditions of urban greening. I argue that they constitute two singularly distinct modes of valuation of plant life, the former predicated upon displaying undead vegetal commodities, the latter upon putting to work plants that are lively and capable. I discuss how value is ascribed to plant life, who has the power to do so, and, using two examples, argue that ecological convivial experiments should be conceived as a reclamation of the power to design-with plants, against the horticultural industry’s hold on the variety, forms, and modalities of vegetal life in cities