Urban Wilderness Walks - by Yuvan

A wonderfully meaningful intervention by MNS spearheaded by Yuvan, Kalpana and Vidya.  Just putting it down here for my future reference.

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By Yuvan

In the last two weeks of August 2021 something happened, perhaps for the first time in Chennai’s history.

Life science students from two women's colleges conducted Urban Wilderness Walks (UWW) in 25 different localities across the city. From Avadi to ICF, Perambur to Pallikaranai, Triplicane to Thiruvanmiyur – the publics in these places, young and old, were guided into experiencing urban spaces through the lens of ecology and biodiversity.

UWW is an internship I am conducting through the Madras Naturalists’ Society for colleges in Chennai. As I write this essay, the first batch of 27 interns are almost at the end of the programme. The dream of this internship is to give young people the experience, skill, and knowledge to be anchors and facilitators around ecology in urban spaces. The dream of this internship is to create a city-wide network of young naturalists, communicators, resource-people, and see if this might in some way shift the city’s culture towards that of deep eco-literacy and belonging; to get the public enmeshed in the care for this unique landscape and bioregion. As part of the course, students document place-histories by engaging with people in their localities, survey and map trees, document biodiversity using citizen science portals, come on field sessions in the different habitats of Chennai, learn teaching and active-learning pedagogies, create their own nature-education material, and of course, create experiences/walks for public in their localities.

After the first set of walks, I met all the interns to listen to their experiences and write down some of what they were sharing. Pavithra conducted her walk in Lloyd’s colony Royapettah, and she said, “I’m quite amazed by the interest shown by all the participants. They were bombarding me with questions…. we saw kingfishers, house sparrows, chalky percher dragonflies, touch-me-not plants and butterflies like the bluebottle, common mormon and emigrant. They were overwhelmed because it was their first time seeing all these”. Faustina, who conducted her walk in Aynavaram colony said, “I really enjoyed working with kids and teaching them. They kept asking questions, and tried to fill the activity sheets I gave them”.Yamini decided to organize her walk for the governmentschool children of Lakshmipuram.She highlighted the children’s keenness towards discovering new species in their neighbourhood, and their almost natural interest in the biodiversity around them, but also noted that they did not have the right kind of opportunities to further their interests. Keerthika did her walk at the Indian Coach Factory (ICF), and she spoke of how she “enjoyed the parts which were not actually planned for the walk, but eventually occurred. For instance, moments like identifying a mushroom, seeing an unknown insect and using a guide to identify those”. At the end of the course in October all of them conducted themed-walks in their urban localities – tree-walks, insect-walks, bird-walks, wetland-walks, dragonfly-walks, nature-journaling sessions and so on. 

Cities are hotspots for trade and economics; or cities are ‘inverted mines’ as my friend and anthropologist Maria Faciolince from the Curasao Islands puts it.

The vision of the UWW is to ask - What are the most relevant articulations and narratives to tell people and children during this time? - and come up with cultural retellings emplaced in the living world. ‘Walk’ is a formative word in Urban Wilderness Walks.

How we choose to move has the potency to shape the world around us.

I go to Elliot’s beach often. I go up till the shore in the mornings, watch what the fisherfolk have brought in, ask them how the seas are, the winds are, then walk North till the Adyar river’s estuary to see its life and flow. The residents and corporation have got used to car-free Sundays on the beach’s promenade. If you visit here on Sunday mornings between 6 –.9 am the road is used by dog-walkers, joggers, zumba dancers, skaters, placard-holding campaigners, balloon-sellers, yoga-doers, frisbee and badminton players, tender-coconut sellers. This promenade on a Sunday morning is a beautiful example of a tiny ‘open-city’, as theorized by sociologist and planner Richard Sennett. The density of people is high and diverse. The street transforms into a social space – because it ensures slow movement. There are many kinds of social mixing and great face-to-face interaction between people who otherwise might never meet in ‘class’ified urban societies. There is talking, laughing, arguing, debating, gossiping, and making. A richness of life which dissipates once the vehicle barricades are removed after 9am.

Elliot’s promenade is a small example of a ‘walking culture’ or a culture of slow movement. In such a place, neighbourhoods are designed for people, not vehicles – quite in contrast to how modern urban spaces are planned. Elliot’s beach helps me imagine how and if walking, and other forms of non-motorized slow-movement, could be a predominant social behaviour. How might that influence city planning? There would be more trees for shade.More parks and benches. Would they be socially, ecologically more inclusive spaces? Yes, I think so. There would be cleaner public toilets at more frequent intervals. More small and diverse kinds of shops and economies would thrive, rather than a few massive mega-malls. In places like Kullu and Amritsar one gets a glimpse of what this might be like, where several of their roads are permanently barricaded to cars. 

In places of slow movement, we would know the names of more of our neighbours. Public spaces would be spaces of creation. More leaflitter would fall on the ground. Grass and brush would grow more densely on the waysides – bringing bees, butterflies, sunbirds and skinks into our daily speech and imagination. Trees would live longer. Frogs will be heardIt is at the pace of walking that our body immerses in the many levels of connection to the living world. 

Human interaction has evolved to happen on the horizontal plane. Our experiences occur primarily on the x-axis. Which throws a question to the other strange fallacy of urban planning – verticalization. Stacking us one on top of each other has the strange effect of increasing density while reducing relatedness and relationships.

My friend Siddharth Agarwal often says that walking “disarms” you. I watched his extraordinary documentary earlier this year, called Moving Upstream Ganga. It is perhaps the first of its kind taken in India. Siddharth walked 3000kms, between June 2016 to April 2017, starting from Ganga Sagar in West Bengal and finishing at Gangotri in Uttarakhand. As he journeys, he interacts and records his conversations with the riparian communities.He stays overnight in people’s riverside huts and documents the challenges they face due to ‘development’ – which, on a river, means building of barrages, bridges, canals for larger vessels, and river-linking projects. His film made me think about how many campaigns demanding, and possibly achieving socio-political change happens on foot. I know that my own feeling of belonging to Chennai and deciding to put roots here came from walking through its landscapes and street-scapes. I think, an active citizenry is always, or at least mostly pedestrian. 

That made me wonder, that if by the age of 10– 12years each child could recognize a hundred plants and trees of their city and locality, how that would change the culture and politics of urban living. This is not a large number. Psychologist Allen Kanner's studies show that an average three- year-old American child can recognize a hundred brands, and almost 300-400 brands by the time they are 10 years old! These numbers maybe a bit lesser in India, but still, imagine.

An amnesia about trees is ironic in a landscape like Tamil Nadu. It is difficult to navigate ten kilometers on its map without entering a place named after a tree or a plant. Take the names of localities in Chennai for instance -Alandur (Alam - Banyan), Veppery (Vepam - Neem), Perambur (Perambu - Cane), Panaiyur (Panai - Palmyra), Purasaiwakkam (Purasu - Palaash), Teynampet (Thennam Pettai, thennai - Coconut) and so on and on.A few months ago, I attended a talk by a Karthikeyan Paarkavidhai who spoke about the trees in the Sangam literature. He quoted lines from Tamil Sangam texts, indicating the possibility that the famous city of Madurai may have come from the word Marudhai/Marudham - also a Tamil word for a vegetation type around water bodies. Interestingly, the highly descriptive and poetic Tamil nature-writing in the Sangam period rose almost a millennium before the first religious Tamil texts. 

A study of Tamil place-names shows how trees and local vegetation have been deeply rooted in people's collective imagination across this wide landscape. I posted this on Instagram, and my comments were filled with names of similar such places from across the world that had names inspired by trees. Bengaluru, somebody said, is named after the Benga tree – Pterocarpus marsupium. Palakad in Kerala from Paala tree – Alstonia scholaris. Pranay, a friend from Telangana, told me that his native village is Vasalamarri – Vasala being beams of wood and Marri being Banyan. A person from Maharashtra began listing names of villages from his state - Pimpal-gaon(sacred fig), Vad-gaon(banyan), Ambe-gaon (Mango), 'Bor'dara, Palasdari (palash valley), Umbre (fig), and so on. 

Similarly, it is as difficult to traverse any direction of Tamil Nadu’s map – or maybe as the trees example brought out, any map – without crossing places named after waterbodies. If you are from Chennai or TN, think of all the place names which have the suffixes – eri, thangal, kulam, odai, and so on.The Urban Wilderness Walks initiative hopes to bring back into Chennai’s culture its ecological histories. It takes inspiration from Nizhal’s tree walks, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, and Anne Hildago. From the Wildflower safaris British writer Lucy Jones takes her young daughter on, on her sidewalks, and from the lake-conducted by Arun Krishnamurthy from Environment Foundation India.It takes inspiration from Robert Macfarlane’s Old Ways and Siddharth Agarwal’s Moving Upstream and from Maria Faciolince’s collective cartography project. From Sandip Patil’s vision and work for pollinator friendly urban streets and Marine Life of Mumbai’s shore-walks. From the toxic tours conducted by my friend and mentor Nityanand Jayaraman, who for decades has been showing the public of Tamil Nadu the violence of large corporations on people and environment, and several such initiatives on footwalks.