Berlin is a city that constantly rewrites its own population, and the women in Benedetta Ristori’s photographs are among those doing the rewriting. Her book takes its title from plants that push through pavement, and from that image it builds an argument about people who put down roots in places that were never designed to hold them. Ristori, working in Berlin, turns her attention to expatriate women who have arrived alone and must assemble a sense of self against a city fabric that is dense, regulated and already occupied.

The portraits are made in rigid urban spaces, and the tension Ristori captures is double: the freedom these women have to reinvent themselves, and the provisional quality of their attachment to where they now live. Between or beside those portraits, the project looks at Berlin’s Kleingärten, the small allotment gardens that offer something the city otherwise withholds. In pairing the two, the book sets mobility against rootedness and asks what each costs.

The title comes from plants that thrive in concrete environments; the book’s guiding idea, borrowed from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and the concept of liquid modernity, is that change and uncertainty are the conditions contemporary life is actually made of. With the frequency of household moves and the expense of urban housing as the ambient conditions, the question of belonging rests less on permanence than on adaptation.

Designed by Carel Fransen and produced by Wilco Art Books in a first edition of 600 copies, the 48-page paperback measures 22.5 by 27.1 centimeters. Ristori’s photographs are intimate, but the spaces they occupy are not. Within the book’s reach is a sequence that makes the reader wonder about the emotional cost of starting over, and about the question of belonging when change is the only constant.

The book’s significance is not in a single, striking image, but in the sequence that binds the portraits to the gardens and makes the whole argument visible.