The Biodiverse City
Year: 2019
Competition Entry: 2020 Lexus Design Awards
Team: Conor O’Shea
The Biodiverse City is a collection of 3D-printed street furniture that provides habitat for wildlife in the face of a changing climate.
As the global climate warms, it is imperative to design novel approaches for integrating natural systems and urban environments.
Worldwide, urban areas are home to numerous insect, bird, and mammal species. However, these places are quickly finding themselves at the front line of climate change. Urban areas have a vital role to play in accommodating an influx of new types of wildlife migrating to higher ground and latitudes as a result of rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, and habitat destruction. Normative and human-centric approaches to city-building must give way to radical alternatives that hybridize natural and built systems. In this new paradigm, cities must facilitate (rather than impede) climate-induced animal migration.
As a response to this urgent ecological condition, The Biodiverse City rethinks four standard urban elements to harbor, and highlight, wildlife in the city. The prototypes (Bee Bollard, Bird Lamp, Insect Paver, and Ant Bench) invite insects and birds to dwell among humans.
Designed using three-dimensional computer models, these files can be sent anywhere in the world for 3D printing in concrete by local builders.
The suite of urban elements express their function through their form and through light. By doing so they engage humans, underscoring that we are inextricably linked in a planetary urban ecological network.
Bee Bollard hybridizes solitary bee habitat with the utilitarian bollard, raising awareness of these threatened species and creating valuable pollinator habitat.
Bird Lamp hybridizes the bird house and the urban street lamp, providing homes for urban dwelling birds with subtle fiber optic lights for human wayfinding.
Insect Paver hybridizes the common paver with tunnels for insects, connecting fragmented habitat, and highlighting insect movement with red fiber optic lighting and translucent concrete.
Ant Bench hybridizes the “ant farm” and the public bench, thereby bringing passersby and users face to face with these normally subterranean insects.
