Narrating ontologies of ruination in the disciplinary blur: Ruins as temporal gardens, trees as legal witnesses and birds as world-makers

This commentary investigates the disciplinary blur that challenges the dual ontology of ruination as being both an urban/architectural transformation and an ecological phenomenon. It defies categorizations of objective knowledge and comes to terms with multispecies and interdisciplinary approaches, both historiographically and ethnographically, readjusting to the multiple temporalities of the nonhuman world-making projects that the human-made ruin becomes part of. Drawing on the urban ruin of 19 th -century Manchester (Cottonopolis), England, and the architectural ruins of contemporary Mogador, Morocco, it argues that the temporalities of the nonhuman, intersected respectively with periodicities of industrial contamination and human abandonment, transform the singular obsolete narrative of ruins into a plural transdisciplinary debate questioning the unyielding becoming of urban space. The text’s historiographical and ethnographical micronarratives, woven together through storytelling, theorize the transformative temporalities of urban nature and their capacity to provide the anthropogenic ruin with a collaborative ecological agency. This, the commentary argues, adds botanical and ornithological ontologies to urban and architectural taxonomies of ruination. By positioning oneself in the disciplinary blur, the commentary ideates on how architectural and urban studies can accommodate unfamiliar rhythms of nonhuman-constructed botanical and ornithological ruins.