Vegetal Thinking and Urban Becoming: Investigating Disturbance, Habitability and Ecology in English Medieval Small Towns

<p dir="ltr">The potential of a concept of disturbance, drawn from ecology but read through the lens of critical plant studies and posthumanism, for understanding past processes of urbanisation is explored. Using examples from medieval England it is proposed that a focus on disturbance, the way that a change in environmental conditions can stimulate changes in wider socio-ecological systems, provides a means to understand urbanisation as a relational, more-than-human process. The benefits of this approach are considered to be the way in which the ecological consequences of urbanisation can be drawn into view, whilst the shaping role of ecologies in determining modes of urbanity which can emerge can also be recognised. As such, the approach furthers recent perspectives which have sought to re-cast urbanisation as an ongoing process of ‘becoming urban’, through which difference within and between urban contexts is a key theme.</p>