6/16/2008

Workshop #1 - BERLIN

Berlin - City of nightingale, symbol of animals coming back to the city.




- What if more animals come to the city ?
- What does the city provides to them ?
- How people would adapt to it ?
- How animal behaviors would change in the city ?
- Will people become wild ?


URBAN RESEARCH TOOLS

We did a first tour in the city, exploring wild places and niches for urban animals. We took earth samples and pictures of different places around Mitte. We also tagged these spaces with positive and negative flags. We developed research tools to observe animals such as a photographic gun, to hunt pictures of wild animals and plants.





Why following animals and plants, we understood that they can indicate the state of their natural habitat and act as "sensors" to inform us about our own urban locus. We develop for this purpose an "eco-analyser" that gives informations in real time about the place. Using organic antennas and a pump-actuated sampler, this device translates bio-chemical sensor data and photospectrometric analysis colour samples to information visualisation to be used in local eco-awareness group.





Finally, we created a eco-friendly tagging tool that let flag interesting places with a bio-substrate that will grow an organic tag and a sampler that manifest potential properties of differents terrains and habitats:







SCENARIOS

Hyper-development of wilderness in the city also opens complex debates about how architecture, politics and citizen action should face together the challenge of co-habitation with wild animals and plants. We develop many scenarios describing how the massive development of intensive agriculture could lead to the deletion of insects and lead to the displacement of many species towards cities. This diagram illustrates a possible scenario and how an eco-systemic future could be adress by citizen designers.







CONCEPTS


If we take a positive approach and envision a successful symbiosis between humans and wild species, we could think of many practical solutions to think about a mutualistic city, shared and open. Some examples here, crossing for animals, shoes that would not go over animals, UV beverage leading to fluorescent pee to trace and protect wild animals, leading to new kind of urban safaris.

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