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What thrives in disturbance?

Tsing writes about matsutake mushrooms. They don’t grow in pristine forests. They grow in forests that have been disturbed—logged, burned, disrupted. The mushroom needs the disturbance. It’s not “surviving despite” damage. It’s thriving because of it.

She calls this “salvage accumulation”—the way capitalism extracts value from ruins, but also the way life finds possibility in damaged landscapes. Not resilience. Not resistance. Something else: emergence from disturbance.

Scott writes about how “improvements” destroy the complex ecologies that actually work. Planned cities eliminate the informal knowledge that made old cities function. Scientific forestry kills the forest.

Macfarlane asks: what if we recognized rivers as legal persons, with rights and representation? Not metaphorically. Actually. With lawyers.

The provocation:

Berlin is a disturbed landscape. Bombed, divided, rebuilt, divided again, reunified, gentrified, contested. It’s not pristine. It’s not stable. The ground is literally unstable—full of unexploded bombs, forgotten tunnels, layers of different cities.

Your task: Find something that exists in Berlin BECAUSE of disturbance, not despite it. Something that couldn’t exist if Berlin had been left alone. Something that needs the gaps, the ruins, the failures of planning, the incompleteness.

Not immigrants adapting (too easy). Not informal economies (we’ve done that).

Look for:

  • Ecologies that require abandonment
  • Practices that need the gaps between jurisdictions
  • Spaces that exist because someone forgot to plan them
  • Knowledge that accumulates in ruins
  • Communities that form in places that “failed”

Bring to session:

  1. Documentation of what you found
  2. An argument: This thing/practice/ecology is not resilient (bouncing back) or resistant (fighting back) but emergent—it couldn’t exist without the specific disturbances that produced it
  3. A legal provocation: If Macfarlane’s rivers can have lawyers, should this thing you found have legal standing? Who would represent it? What would its rights be?

Connect this to your Middle East research: What emerges from war, displacement, colonial violence that couldn’t have existed otherwise? Not “silver linings” (offensive) but genuine new formations that previous conditions couldn’t produce?


Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (15. Dezember 2025). What thrives in disturbance? Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 9. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15cmn


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