The Forest as a Territory for the Operations of Planetary Urbanisation: Sorting Forest Areas on the Vasser Valley in Romania

Abstract

Lefebvre’s 1970 prophecy of the total urbanisation of society has come true with the expansion of the urban into natural and rural territories. For Lefebvre, the question of nature is closed by its ‘steady, violent death’ (Lefebvre, 2003) and its replacement by a ‘second nature’ (Schmid, 2014; Smith, 2008). This closure accounts at an epistemic level, for the dominance of the urban (Krause, 2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2014). Far from being closed, the question of nature is renewed within the present conditions of planetary urbanisation, as the interiorised non-urban is ‘operationalised’ to sustain urban growth, thus making the non-city ‘an essential terrain of capitalist urbanisation’ (Brenner, 2016). In what follows, I present how the Romanian forest is operationalised as a territory of planetary urbanisation through forest management practices. Looking into the negotiations and manipulations on the ground provides a way to ‘pay attention’ (Stengers, 2010) to those practices that sort and select natural areas. In the face of the recorded disappearance of the forest, the effort of making visible the rationality of planning, and the challenges that are posed upon it inscribes itself within an ‘ethics of visibility’ (Roberts, 2012; Topalovic, 2016).