The project-ification of urban natures

Project times are instrumental in co-producing temporalities of urban natures. To unpack how the figure of the project alters understandings of and governs relations with plant life, I point to frameworks through which urban ecologies come into being and are subsequently cared for. To illustrate these linkages, I draw on site visits to urban greening interventions in Hyderabad, Telangana (India) created as part of a state-led afforestation programme. In addition to a spatial ordering of plants for conservation, afforestation practices take shape through a ‘timing’ of vegetal life, in terms of projected and project gains. Taking the project-ification of plant life seriously, I argue that calls to recognise plural, divergent or non-linear temporalities would still need to contend with deeply entrenched, pervasive frameworks of project management in the governance of urban natures. Eco-managerial time practices and ways of relating to plants are, therefore, crucial sites of intervention for vegetal geography. Lastly, I question the uptake of the infrastructural lens, which interrogates how urban greening fails to perform its promised services without a critical look at the practices of doing, composing or contracting infrastructures, arguing instead for a study of ‘nature as project’.