Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 2)

Plants and trees in urban landscapes
João Miguel Diógenes de Araújo Lima
João Miguel Diógenes de Araújo Lima
The two bypasses, and the Cocó Park today, 2018
a squatter, they defy land use and ‘occupy’
cities, demonstrating not only the fertility
of the land beneath, but also the vitality of
plants.
In this sense, plants that occupy cities can’t
merely be called ‘weeds’. These spontaneous
urban plants are instead more appropriately
titled ocupadeiras. It is a Portuguese word
I made up, combining the verb ocupar
(occupy) and the noun trepadeiras (climbing
plants, that lean on other plants and
structures in order to grow). For a similar
term in English, I first considered ‘occuplants.’
Then I thought perhaps ‘squatter’ plants
would aggregate an explicit political
dimension of spatial subversion to these
urban creatures.
Ocupadeiras make us believe there is
a non-human way of activism, silently
engaged by plants. This may be a proposal
based in fiction, but they indeed occupy
both the physical urban spaces and the
imaginary human spaces of the mind. Cities
can accommodate nature willingly or with
obstinacy, in a relationship where nature’s
agency is always looking for ways to burst
into an urban landscape. As I became more
aware of these plants, they engendered a
political and poetic shift in my own ways
of human activism: instead of focusing on
80 Mapping Meaning, the Journal