For too long the forest and city have been at odds. The one chopped down to build the other.

The Ramayana (an ancient Hindu epic) describes a forest-city inhabited by monkey creatures.
It is called Kishkindha.
It is not a bucolic paradise as would be understood in the West,
but a place nonetheless where humans, flora and fauna live in immediate proximity.

What if New York could be transformed into a Kishkindha?

What if it was designed not by planners? But by the root systems of trees and mushrooms?

What if it was designed not as land but as land/water.

What if huge creatures appeared that slowly ate away the old city, and in their tracks left the beginnings of a verdant forest and a new post-human order.

What if these creatures - at first man-made, would become over time anabiotic entities living on their own, moving every further afield.

Creatures that are part bio-organic machine, part deity, destroying and rebuilding.

A shape shifting city.

A city which is not one.

Kishkindha NY - Exegesis

Kishkindha is the name of the third ‘city’ in the Indic epic The Ramayana. The first two cities, better known and much celebrated, are Ayodhya and Lanka, apotheoses of the worlds of divine order and licentious excess, respectively. Kishkindha is the name of a third place, a city of the forest, inhabited by monkeys. Uncanny indigenous insight, Kishkindha offers a way to rethink the city, in all its utopian and dystopian forms, as also its others, its places of uncivilization, barbarism and beastiality. To be clear, Kishkindha is not a city in the forest, it is the forest as city, that which is neither just forest or city, but the forest as city, or the city as forest.

Kin to Luce Irigeray’s “This Sex Which is Not One”, Kishkindha is the city “which is not one”, which is to say a past-future place of inhabitation that is both city and forest, where human and non-human beings can flourish together. At the planetary scale it is obvious that we all have to share this one planet we call home. This is not just a matter of protecting our rain forests and composting our food-wastes. It is also imperative that we rethink the city as a planetary, post-human, multi-species entity.

This requires new imaginaries and the empowerment of non-human centered agencies and consciousnesses. Kishkindha NY is O(U)R way of producing such an imaginary in the form of speculative science fiction.  O(U)R agent is the ‘beastie’. The Kishkindha beastie is at the scale of the proverbial monster, a large creature often hydridic in nature that usually lives in the landscape. Most of these creatures were fearsome and are to be found in folklore around the world: Balor (Celtic) or Gogmagog (Welsh), Polyphemus the Cyclops (Greece), or Onin (Japan). One can also include in the list the sphynx or even the monsters in the seas that lurk in the maps of old. But there are also modern-day versions: Jabberwocky of Lewis Carroll, Godzilla of the late 20th and even Bumblebee—a fictional robot character appearing in the Transformers films—of the early 21st century. These creatures inhabit a particular ‘scale’ in our imagination. They are larger and more powerful than humans, but are not all powerful monotheistic abstractions. They have some of the attributes of demi-gods, but they are not deities spouting out rules by which humans are supposed to live. They have feelings, emotions, histories and above all destinies. 

The Kishkindha beastie extends this ancient ‘space’ of imagination. Though to some degree fearsome, it is a creature that works to produce a better world. It does not do so in some easy collaboration with humans, but as a trans-natural, anabiotic entity. An anabiotic is a restorative remedy; a powerful stimulant, a reanimation after apparent death. In this case, what has died is the city, and not just in technical terms, but in ideological and philosophical terms as well. The death of the city is the death of its ancient imaginary as the traditional locus of civilization. Cities today, despite urban planners – or perhaps precisely because of them - are nothing but bad xerox copies of each other and yet we are condemned to live in them in ever greater numbers. What if – as in our science fictional account of an imagined Kishkinda NY – there is a whole new way to design the city. It would require that the human agency that has been at its central tenant of urban design would have to be given up, not totally, but at least enough so that other forms of consciousness could be integrated into the processes of making. And what if the forest which has traditionally sacrificed itself for the city, was to grow with the city? What if humans who have systematically purged animals from their cities, lived with animals with all the benefits and risks that that entailed. Our modern world has defamiliarized ourselves with theriomorphic and zoomorphic potential that resides in the animals and plants and that once – in the ancient days of the shaman – was seen as intertwined with human destiny.

But the Kishkindha is no ‘animal,’ but a complex muti-species being, part biological part mechanical that has a singular goal: the transform the dead city into a new space of habitation. It is not driven by a moral code, or even by the teleology of human happiness, but assumes that relationships will be worked out along the way with the passage of time. We hope that the new world is indeed better than the current one, but it will have to be judged in ways that are different from current standards, and that are impossible for us to imagine at the current time.