hind the advancing building fronts restricting, rather than promoting, conditions of healthy growth. Indeed, the way we imagine and build our cities is at odds with the natural infrastructures that support the diverse ecologies that we share with other organisms. Regardless of our best efforts to remain at the top of a hierarchy of our own design, the radical creativity that exists within biological systems has a myriad ways to subvert our anthropocentric intentions. Grime and its allies—waste, rubbish and excrement—lurk persistently, as a soil-body in waiting, to relentlessly organise and transform spaces that have been neglected by design paradigms. Inch-by-inch, dust from crumbling walls mixes with detritus and fast food leftovers. Sticky bacteria-laden concoctions gather incongruously in crevices to lay down the infrastructure for an urban wilderness. Curious creepers, bacterial films and wandering wild flowers bloom from out of the slurry. If humans do not sanitise these weeds on sight, they unleash their radical creativity and continue their work by transforming the aseptic surfaces of buildings into new soil substrates. Natural forces urgently midwife the fledgling soil towards independence through ingenious counter-tactics such as corrosive salting and algal greening of brickwork. Tree roots upheave pavement slabs and underground springs weaken building foundations until the young propagating soil body subsumes its own networks, which yield fresh urban life forms and break open architectural shells to release a biodiverse future. As more of us move into our megacities that are founded on modernist principles and their infrastructures, we hug our cleanliness closely—reluctant to give any ground back to nature. Yet the already stressed substructures of modern cities are suffering from urban decay with its associated systemic problems such as crime, traffic congestion, homelessness, scarce resource provision, waste collection—that generate squalor and urban filth. As cities continue to struggle with these issues, there is little to distinguish self-composting modernism from the living, umbilical membrane that gathers momentum through a relentless, interconnected assemblage of bottom-up processes. Indeed, only time can differentiate between them. 44. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 115.
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Perhaps the whole world is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption.44
There is great connectivity between the living and non-living worlds—we are all stardust, of different qualities, varieties and abilities. The unique condition of earth is its propensity to spew forth living materials that oozed life into