In the early hours of the morning on New Year’s Day, I pay another visit to Bakhtrioni’s Forest. Taking in the sober view of Saburtalo from the hill, I feel that the city has come to resemble a cemetery. Graves in Georgia are rarely housed in uniform plots, and as cemeteries expand they can produce a landscape that is erratic and hard to navigate. The broader city, with its uneven enclosures, ad-hoc urban planning, and frustrated mobility, has begun to feel this way: a place not meant for life. With a ground that is suffocated by concrete, mountains cut in half to make highways, and streams buried underground, the hill that I stand on represents one of the few places where someone can go to experience a vestige of the area’s organic geography. But it’s not quite appropriate to compare the city to a cemetery. In fact, the sanctity of graves in Tbilisi’s actual cemeteries has been a red line preventing companies from redeveloping what is otherwise often prime real estate.¹⁵ In a city where almost everything has become available for a price, Tbilisi’s actual cemeteries have become sanctuaries for life that is otherwise, increasingly, relegated.

Another way in which Tbilisi's architectural development diverges from a cemetery is in its rebuttal of history. The city today doesn’t appear intent on memorialising the past – but in breaking clean from it. Take the monosyllabic courtyards and stairwells of m², a construction company that builds residential complexes in Tbilisi, with their wipe-down surfaces and round-the-clock security. Or White Square, another prolific construction company, which advertises itself with the slogan, ‘start life from a clean page’.¹⁶ These developments eat away at the city’s last remaining open spaces, and are tailed by an increasingly sterile approach to managing what little green space is left. We could see the push to create ‘legible’, ‘tamed’, and simplified landscapes as attempts to clean the slate of history, and to live in a world where the space for action is uncontaminated by social, historical, or political context. Such ideals conceal the pernicious ways in which these spaces themselves condition the scope for action — establishing a homogenous environment that hinges on a series of implicit assumptions. You can be whoever you want, if you’re all more or less the same. 

The anonymous aesthetic of private developers is being echoed in public landscaping. This is particularly evident in the masterplan for the redevelopment of Saburtalo’s old Soviet-era hippodrome, which represents the last open space of its kind in the area. Following a long, unsuccessful campaign by local activists, this site is being developed by a Dutch landscape architecture firm into Tbilisi’s ‘Central Park’, with ‘French’ and ‘Japanese’ gardens.¹⁷ Even the central park of our capital city has been designed as a simulacrum of other places. 

Tbilisi’s parks also offer limited autonomy to plants, insects, and animals. Long grass is mown. Dead leaves are prevented from rotting. Ruderal is sprayed with herbicides. Native plants are passed over for imported species. Shrubs are often placed at regimented distances, with identically pruned bushes planted at equal spaces between trees. Nature is thus increasingly made ‘legible’, much like the desired human subject under the state – designed, uniform and easy to control and maintain.¹⁸ As ever-greater numbers of people are packed tightly into concrete tower blocks, public parks – the few green spaces that remain accessible – provide little room to establish meaningful, reciprocal or multivalent relationships with other forms of life.

Some people might regard these spatial dislocations as an expression of our species’ liberation from constraints; an overcoming of space and time for the global, ‘seamless’ flow of styles and commodities. Yet in Georgia, these developments are rising in step with the increasing authoritarianism of the state.¹⁹*²⁰ Recent years have seen a proliferation of CCTV cameras in the city’s parks and streets, and the increasing restrictions on people’s right to space has been crystallized by the state’s approval of a law that – having exhausted all other means of discouraging public protest – criminalises obstructing the pavement. Today, the mere act of standing on a pavement with the ‘wrong’ political intent can land you in prison.²¹ As the state attempts to impose itself into every environment it can access, it feels ever more important to foster and protect spaces that resist domination. 

One hot summer’s day, I was walking in the vicinity of Lisi Lake, a large recreational area on the periphery of Saburtalo. Despite its social and ecological significance, the land around the lake had been sold to developers who had begun to build expensive housing on it. Staring at the ground as I walked through the trees, I was disturbed by the sight of thousands of ailanthus altissima seedlings. In many cases, the eager saplings of this invasive tree were growing directly at the base of the existing tree trunks. Overcome by an urge to share my civic concern, I approached a man on a nearby bench to relay the news to him. He was unperturbed; amused, even. “This is private land. I’m sure the owner’s taking care of it.” I noted that this didn’t seem to be the case. "Well," he said, "this is private land, so it’s up to the owners what they do with it.” That’s beside the point, I replied. Seeds don't recognise the borders that our species draws between private and public space.²² The man leaned in towards me with a sudden look of interest.

“What about drug addiction? Do you care about that?” Startled, I asked him what he meant. “Why don’t you talk to me about drug addiction? Or other important social problems? Do you think trees are more important?”

There were several interesting things in what he had said. The man was clearly privileging a social problem like addiction over the local environment. Yet he had unknowingly forged a productive connection; rather than imposing an artificial boundary between the two realms, it started to feel like addiction and ecology should be talked about within the same breath.

The dislocation theory of addiction suggests that the underlying reason for the rising social prevalence of addiction in recent centuries – from addiction to substances, to commodities, money, and beyond – corresponds to the emergence of free market societies. With their ‘unrelenting pressures towards individualism, competition, and rapid change’, these factors have dislocated people from their psychosocial lives, leading them to fill the gaps with substitutes that become destructive.²³ Could the rapid changes that Georgian society had undergone with marketization have been a determining factor in the rise of addictive behaviours? Certainly, it felt like developers in Georgia were addicted to acquiring land, destroying habitats and building high-rises, despite the ever-increasing inability of the city to absorb these changes.²⁴

Curiously, the same associations were presented to me by another encounter in the vicinity of Lisi Lake. I was walking slowly through the woodland and bending down frequently to look at plants – behaviour that aroused the suspicion of three policemen, who sheepishly approached and asked to search me. They suspected me of searching for hidden drugs.