No planning department approved the root system currently lifting a sidewalk slab three centimetres out of alignment two streets from here, and none will be consulted about where it goes next. Plants do not wait for permission to redesign the infrastructure they grow through. Roots crack foundations on their own schedule; volunteer species colonise vacant lots faster than remediation plans can be drafted; a single unmanaged verge can shift a neighbourhood's drainage pattern within a decade. Plant agency is not a metaphor borrowed from ecology to make urban writing sound current — it names a real distribution of causal power that most planning frameworks simply omit because they were built to describe human decisions only. SoilCustody names what happens when a plant's slow, unauthorised transformation of ground becomes the de facto custodian of a site's material future, outlasting whichever human institution nominally owns the deed. Cities are already co-authored by species that never signed anything.
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Calvillo, N. (2023) Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
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