Victorian cemeteries are the campest of all funerary trends. Take Glasgow’s Necropolis as an example. Dominating the skyline of the East End, the Necropolis chokes with conventional Victorian memorial features: countless ornate crosses inscribed with so much indiscernible Latin, hundreds of draping, perky-breasted angels, huge granite erections (columns), and the vases with a tea towel thrown over them (urns and shrouds). You can’t avoid noticing the death sheds (mausoleums) which were also immensely popular among Glasgow’s elite; though now they’re veritable archeological sites, evidencing the city’s Buckfast
addiction through the ages. 

While there is an element of Christian fanaticism here, these cemeteries point to a deeper obsession with the ritualisation of death;  an obsession that has probably come to define at least two centuries of civic design.  In the 19th century, mortality rates soared as populations grew and migrated towards cities. In Europe and America, the compounding effects of industrialisation and empire, two of history’s most problematic get-rich-quick schemes, resulted in rapid urban growth and a crisis of space; traditional Medieval cemeteries couldn’t keep up with the demand. Bodies were piling up. And you know what they say about litter? Litter begets litter. Well, dead bodies in the street beget dead bodies in the street.

Overcrowding and disease are usually the mothers of invention; consider the Sioux and Lakota tribes of Northern America who erected 8ft tall wooden scaffolds as part of a type of ‘sky burial’ to minimise contact with the dead body. Or even the Père-Lachaise in Paris, which inspired Glasgow’s Necropolis, a now famous municipal city park and cemetery that was created for reburials after city officials became concerned about the spread of disease. To create demand for the Père-Lachaise, the site’s architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart and urban planner Nicolas Frochot relocated the remains of famous figures from other cemeteries; proving that celebrities can sell you anything, and have been for the last 100 odd years. Part of the charm of the Père-Lachaise and the Necropolis is that they function as public parks as well as burial sites.

In America, a similar movement emerged with the construction of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts - around the same time that The Cemeteries Act of 1832 was passed in Britain, promoting the building of cemeteries outside of cities. With the emergence of these ‘gardens of the dead’ comes the emergence of a new kind of experience economy, hinged on the enjoyment of the picturesque, and the sanitized distancing of the dead from the realm of the living. Keith Eggener, an Associate Professor of American art and architecture at the University of Missouri points out that in the 1800s, America didn’t really have public parks or botanical gardens in cities, and that cemeteries were important natural spaces where an individual could enjoy a variety of activities such as
meditation, or a picnic.

At this juncture we summon Michel Foucault, a 20th century cult figure, theorist and bald man who wrote prolifically, radically and sometimes opaquely (he’s French) about sexuality, power, and space. He looks villainous until you see him sipping a wine glass filled to the absolute brim with orange juice in that sexually charged debate with Chomsky. Foucault was obsessed with space, and graveyards and gardens have particular prominence in a work titled ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986). The text itself, which is adapted from lecture notes, is a little…random. It has the quality of a really well-researched coke-fuelled monologue delivered at 400,000,000 mph at an afters. He is fond of grandeur and loves to make you read a sentence twice. What he attempts to relate in the text, is the way in which spaces are charged; how they ‘claw’ and ‘gnaw at us’. In the first section he points out that we do live not in a ‘void’, but in a set of relations; sites such as beaches, trains and bedrooms actively ‘draw us out of ourselves’. What he is saying, in his ornate Rococo way, is that space is not neutral; it is effective. Space is where our ideas are made manifest. From medieval ideas of sanctity and profanity, to our modern preoccupations with time and truth, space is volatile, it holds us to account. Space produces us. Space is the dom, you are the sub. 

The main category of space he explores is ‘heterotopia’, a contradictory concept of many gradations; it is both inside and outside of time, absolutely real and somewhat mythic. It is divisible into Five Principles, but even these are not so straightforwardly discrete. It’s easy to feel like he’s fucking (with) you. The heterotopia is unusual because of the way it is unlike other spaces; it neutralises and inverts the set of relations that make up a conventional space. An example, please, you scream. Take the ‘crisis heterotopia’ which he outlines in his description of the First Principle; these are ‘privileged, sacred or forbidden places’ reserved for people in a state of crisis, say adolescents or the elderly. Even more specific, consider the ‘honeymoon’, where sexuality is displaced and where a woman’s ‘deflowering’ (his words) can take place in a ‘nowhere realm’ outside of the family home. Similarly, the heterotopias of deviation such as care homes and psychiatric wards, are where individuals demonstrating ‘deviant’ behaviour to the accepted social norm can be kept apart from society. He also considers ships, brothels and colonies to be examples of heterotopia. 

As history unfolds, certain heterotopia, those which fall into the Second Principle, change in function and are ‘re-used’. The cemetery is his primary example. He considers the cultural ideology driving the movement of the cemetery from the heart of the city to the outskirts, beyond the overcrowding and body-snatching, to be the individualisation of death, or as he puts it the widespread belief that ‘everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay’ and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery which produced the ‘obsession with death as an “illness”’. This is how the cemetery qualifies as heterotopia. It is both a private space for mourning, for a person to rest in their ‘box for… personal decay’ as well as a public park. It is a space completely dedicated to the concept of death whilst simultaneously sanitizing it - removing mortality from view. 

Foucault was writing in the 1980s, an epoch he defines by the formal relations of proximity between points or elements such as ‘series, trees or grids’. He recognised that the circulation and confluence of knowledge and the desire to achieve certain ‘human aims’ had become, in the 20th century, mechanised. Demography still guides us, but in the age of hyper-capitalism, of social media and climate change, the space problem is less easy to define or treat. Looking closely at the year 2022, this obsession has become magnified: overcrowding, higher life expectancies, housing crises, and the pandemic, all of these factors flavour our anxieties about space and direct us in our solution-finding. We balance the infinite spacelessness of the Internet with the ever contracting geography of our real lives. We have to ‘re-use’ the cemetery in many ways possibly unthinkable to Foucault because we’re literally running out of space and time. 

The ceremonies surrounding end of life are looking less and less like a traditional burial in a traditional cemetery. The way we ritualise death in a physical space is changing. With a finger on what once was a pulse, Funeral Partners (UK branch) predict that themed funerals are on the up, meaning you could have anything from a colour-themed funeral to a Disney-themed one. No more perky-breasted angels and sombre black-tie affairs then. According to US Urns Online, in 2022 more people have been turning to direct cremation; a process which involves little to no body preparation and low overall costs, because cost is very much the determining factor. According to Money Helper, the average cost of direct cremation is £1,554, whereas a burial using a funeral director is £4,383. Then there are the additional fees. A headstone or memorial plaque coming in at £1,016, and if you don’t have a family of grief-chefs, catering can cost around £450, venue and car hire at £336 + £282, then with the flowers, obituary, urn etc you’re looking at around £2,640 on top of the cremation or burial fee. Bankruptcy has never been so morbid. 

Covid too has undeniably changed the rituals around death and has exaggerated, as illnesses do, the anxiety around the pollutant or contagious qualities of death. To minimise contact among mourners, virtual funerals have become the norm, whereby funeral services are streamed via Youtube or Facebook. Natasha Mikles, Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Texas State University conducted a study of the changes in funerary rituals during the pandemic, and what became apparent to her is that the transformation in these rituals failed to help mourners deal with their grief. One individual interviewed for the study stated that the virtual funeral held over Facebook “felt like a parody of a funeral.” Even so, for many, having any ceremony at all was important and granted that necessary opportunity to reflect on and celebrate a loved one. 

I feel very lucky. I buried my grandmother in a patch of designated woodland for burials not far from her house in Friesland, The Netherlands. She chose a small, overgrown patch just off the main path, behind a resplendent bramble. I was there when she died, I helped carry her and bury her in the ground on a cold November afternoon. You can’t officially mark out graves on this site with tombstones or any alien species like a bouquet of roses, but we managed to craft a haphazard headstone from some chunky branches and a couple of hefty stones. Her grave looks contrived enough for us to recognise it, but it is still coherent with the ecosystem. This is a common feature of nature burial grounds which often have strict rules about how a grave should look. I have visited her now in every season. Each time I forget where we put her because the path is either completely overgrown or stripped bare and uniform. I am always struck by the immediacy of the elements. I shoo a woodlouse from her head, though I know she’s probably pretty friendly with every kind of insect by now. It may be unconventional, but it allows me to imagine her as part of the constant changing of the seasons; she seems to fit perfectly in those rhythms. 

There are so many ways to be dead right now and green burials like these seem to be an increasingly popular favourite, with companies like the Co-op offering advice on how to make your funeral ‘Eco-Friendly’. One to watch is the Coeio Infinity Burial Suit, created by artist and designer Jae Rhim Lee made out of organic cotton and seeded with mushroom spores. The suit is designed to perform three main functions: body decomposition, to reverse the harmful leaching of industrial toxins from the body in the ground, and to deliver nutrients from the body to plants. She adds that the project also offers a healthy antidote to death denial.  

Green burial sites are also antidotes the environmental stresses traditional burial practices and cemeteries have on the environment. It can minimise the impact of toxic embalming fluid that is secreted from corpses, or in avoiding the use of incinerators for cremation, eco-friendly funerals can reduce the amount of carbon monoxide and mercury that is pumped out into the atmosphere. Rewilding or letting nature ‘take-over’ also means that fewer pesticides are used to maintain those perfect green cemeteries.  Rewilding is a particularly crucial concept; it is an act which involves minimising human intervention in natural spaces.  You could rewild your garden if you wanted to, let the weeds and the bees prosper. The mainstay of most if not all rewilding projects, is either to increase biodiversity in sites which have been reduced to monocultures, or to reintroduce species that have since been eradicated from their habitats like beavers or in some cases even wolves. Whilst public opinion is slowly accepting rewilding, it has been taken up by organisations like God’s Acre, who are rewilding existing graveyards and cemeteries to create alternative conservation sites. Churchyards comprise a variety of habitats such as gravestones, woodland, grassland and scrub, perfect for supporting species like lichen, slow worms and bats. The relative quiet and lack of foot traffic in these places means many of these species can thrive undisturbed. 

Nature burial grounds, or green burials are not without their expense. Co-op FuneralCare offers a vague figurwe between £200 and £2,000, meaning that once again for most people, there are cost barriers even if the demand is there. Despite the cost and perhaps perspectival shift that hasn’t quite happened yet, green burials are tantalising. All of these options can be considered solutions to the crisis of space, as much as they pose an exciting new way of treating and thinking about the body, especially the dead body - a difficult subject laden with taboo and superstition. 

There is still an element of separateness, and cemeteries, even rewilded ones maintain that ‘garden of the dead’ vibe. For Foucault, gardens have a special place in his treatment of heterotopia. They are ‘microcosms of the world’ he says, sites in which we can see, with all that explicit, beautiful misery, the cycles of life and death play out: the moth caught in a web, the fledgling trying first flight. In the garden life and death are obvious. They are there and we must attend to them. In an article on heterotopia and cemeteries, Foucault scholar Peter Johnson notes the way in which modern cemeteries must ‘adapt and mutate’ to take on and develop new environmental and historical functions. They are necessary because they balance our most basic contradictions; the mundane and extraordinary. Cemeteries recall myths of paradise and at the same time mark the final rite of passage. To solve the crisis of space today, perhaps this is what we need to do: to rewild or reuse spaces, to adapt and mutate, to celebrate the contradictions. The ending is never neat. You think you understand, you think you have made peace and after all that it still feels like Foucault is fucking (with) you.