The Future of the Built Environment

29 November 2025

It is strange to read Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses while my body is under siege. When I first arrived in the Dominican Republic, I assumed I was the foreign object entering the environment, but soon it was the other way round. My stomach is presently a cocoon to a bug, an ideal, warm shelter for the bug to feed and reproduce. Though it was once only a single bacterium, within 7 hours it has doubled so many times that it now numbers over a million.

The bug is not intentionally hostile; it is only trying to survive - 'to live is… always to occupy'. Though I know the bug can't hold power for long, I'm aware the conflict will mark me. It will join the crowd of influencers that sway in my stomach. Like Coccia's description of the plant as a gardener rather than the garden, just by matter of ever having arrived the bacterium claims a stake in any future vision of the place. Perhaps the same is true of a person in a city.

Does that make me a gardener of every city I've ever visited? I spent, between the air conditioning of the airport and the mint air freshener of the cab, one minute in the heavy humidity of Santo Domingo. But the driver who dropped me off outside of town, he being a member of the city network, was affected by me, his path and timeline were impacted by the journey I requested. His car's movement affects the traffic, his mood when he gets home affects those he lives with, the money I paid him will be spent on some object, also facilitated by movement, or toward movement itself – gas, a trip, his daughter's bus fare. It is difficult to even comprehend gardens this complicated. The millions upon millions of objects moving through the city create grooves and kinks in the surface every day to make way for themselves.

I try to find some comfort in Coccia's thesis: this is living itself, to 'assimilate the lives of others, the bodies of others, into our own'. There are 100 trillion bacteria, or gardeners, in my gut. Sitting in the back of the taxi, one arm across my stomach and the other holding onto my friend, the cramps are evidence that the city inside my body is working, and that this is nothing other than being alive.