Making Cities "More Than Human"
The Planning Commission will now hear from Mr. Powerful Owl
Sitting in a wine bar in Biddeford, Maine, not long ago, I found myself paying too much attention to the brick facade of an old textile mill across the street, and too little to my companions. This wasn’t just bad manners. It was arguably nonsensical, because the facade resembled a prison, maybe eight stories tall, intermittently punctuated by meager little windows, and continuing without relief for four or five blocks down Main Street.
What caught my attention were a couple of rows of small rectangular niches built into the facade, and the birds that were using them as nesting sites.
The idea that buildings and cities should be designed to accommodate wildlife, as well as their human inhabitants, isn’t new. People have been building dovecotes and pigeon houses where they live for thousands of years, and occasionally incorporating bird nesting nooks in exterior walls like the ones I saw in Biddeford. But lately, the push to make urban greening emphasize urban wildlife has become a movement.
That’s still mainly because big, green, wildlife-friendly spaces serve practical human needs. The City of Toronto, for instance, is currently bringing back a lost river and running it through a new 330-acre green space in its old industrial port lands. Birds and aquatic wildlife will benefit. But the primary motive is to help mitigate the kind of catastrophic flooding now being experienced elsewhere because of climate change. That is, green space will mainly serve human need by sponging up floodwater and then spilling it out into Lake Ontario.
That’s not enough, according to an emerging school of thought about what “more than human” cities should be. This approach treats native species as important stakeholders and active participants in planning how the urban environment evolves.
To understand this “more than human” idea, it helps to start with its critique of how badly even today’s ostensibly “greenest” cities do at being wildlife friendly. Singapore, for instance, has made a glowing reputation as the “City in a Garden,” recently upgrading itself to the “City in Nature.” Along with “skyrise” gardens on many buildings, its most celebrated feature is an urban park called “Gardens by the Bay.” First opened in 2012, its 260 acres feature lush ground-level plantings, plus domed plant conservatories, and a grove of massive artificial “supertrees” covered with plants. David Attenborough, no less, praised the supertrees in a BBC documentary as “perhaps the most spectacular example of city greening.” The park, he suggested, was a model for “wildlife thriving within our cities across the planet.”
In reality, the park and its supertrees stand on what was formerly a marsh. Bird, butterfly, and dragonfly species, “some of which were rare and endangered,” depended on this “critical habitat,” according to a new book Re-Imagining the More Than Human City: Stories from Singapore. As in botanical gardens elsewhere, many of the plants in the conservatories and on the supertrees come from distant continents and have little to do with southeast Asian tropical botany. For wildlife, kingfishers and charismatic otters are welcome to the park and the city, but other less-than-charming wildlife not so much. It’s the natural world filtered through a Disney lens.
So how would “more than human” advocates do it better? Another new book came across my desk this week called Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities: Beyond Sustainability, Towards Cohabitation. It’s written for researchers, not the general public, and my eyebrows went up at the idea that urban planners should listen to wildlife along with children, the elderly, the disabled, and other traditionally disenfranchised groups. Likewise at a proposal to reimagine “trees as designers, birds as clients, and humans as assistants.”
The practical details of what it means to take design instructions from wildlife proved much more intriguing. Even conservationists don’t seem to do it very well. They build nest boxes for lesser kestrels that become deathtraps in a heat wave. Or they build perfectly acceptable artificial dens for swift foxes, but fail to monitor or maintain them, so that most soon become blocked up and useless.
In Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities, on the other hand, one chapter describes an approach to understanding how canopy-perching birds use the surviving Eucalyptus trees in an area under heavy development pressure near Canberra, Australia. The few old growth trees in the area are the vanishing remnant of a forest that once covered much of southeastern Australia. The birds that depend on these trees are small and mobile, and a challenge for human study. Instead, researchers used automated video monitoring with artificial intelligence to help understand what the trees provide and how the birds use it.
It may sound as if it would be simpler to just plant more trees and stand back. But the best estimate is that even 10,000 seedlings planted at the site would need 172 years to achieve the mature canopies that are useful to birds. And models predict that urban Canberra will lose the last of its old trees in as little as 80 years.
Listening to the trees and the birds now, and then designing artificial structures to replicate their relationship, is in effect the last best hope for about 20 local bird species. Those designs might not appeal to human eyes—they look a bit like cellphone towers crossed with a game of pickup-sticks. But human need isn’t the point.
In a related project, in Melbourne, Australia, researchers set out to help the powerful owl, a threatened species that used to live in old growth forests but now colonizes cities for the abundant prey. Urban habitat is in short supply, however, and conventional nest boxes have failed to support breeding. Instead, the researchers set out to understand how the owls see the city. Then they mapped areas around the city with owl sightings and desirable habitat, and worked to replicate the natural tree hollows and termite mounds the owls prefer. At each location, they used laser scanning to record the precise shape of the point where a branch attaches to a tree. Holographic construction techniques then enabled the project to design and 3-D print a simulated termite mound precisely fitted both to the owls and to the selected site. How well the owls will adapt to these new homes remains to be seen. But as the researchers continue to refine their methods, they argue that their “more than human” approach “can contribute to the reconstruction of cities as homes for nonhuman lifeforms.”
This is admittedly a long way from getting designers of human habitat to see the world through the eyes of urban wildlife and accommodate it. Architects are still congratulating themselves if their buildings just kill fewer animals—for instance, by using fritted glass to prevent bird collisions, or by recycling rainwater on site to avoid flooding everything around them. Including micro-habitats is also a bragging point, even if they give little consideration to the birds, butterflies, or other species that might live there. These are paltry concessions to the natural world, not much of an improvement on the niches I saw on that facade in Biddeford.
There are, however, hopeful signs—or at least forerunners of a possible change. Toronto now has an open-air “Multi-Species Lounge,” designed by the educator-architect team of Joyce Hwang and and Nerea Feliz. It features seating for humans with habitat above and below for insects, birds, DeKay’s snakes, and other wildlife. Hwang has also designed a prototype building facade that houses bats.
In New York City, Cookfox, an architecture firm, and the engineers at Buro Happold, have designed a building facade to accommodate plants and nesting birds, with holes drilled to sizes variously preferred by aphid-hunting wasps, summer leaf-cutters, smaller resinous bees, and “wasps carrying mud and grass.” So far, it’s still a prototype. But Cookfox is seeking clients willing to see the urban world through wildlife eyes—clients who understand that wildlife can be part of the pleasure of a building and the city around it.
There’s time for other architects, urban planners, landscapers, builders, and their clients to get onboard—but not much. Just since 1970, wildlife numbers in this country have dropped catastrophically. Urban development that’s blind and deaf to wildlife is a major cause, and it is eating up habitat everywhere.
But let’s get back to the positive forerunners: Just since 2008, New York City has developed an 85-acre park on derelict docklands. The designers specifically landscaped Brooklyn Bridge Park for its appeal to wildlife, and it worked. The native plants have become home to insects, birds, and other wildlife not seen in New York City in decades. With five million human visitors every year, it’s evident that people also want to be where they have wildlife around them.
“We didn’t used to have these animals and honestly, we didn’t even notice that they were missing,” said ecological landscaper Rebecca McMackin, after the arrival of katydids and crickets in the park. “But then one day, the grasshoppers started calling, and the crickets started singing, and we had the katydids at night, and it just completely transformed the park, because the animals are integral to the park experience for people. They give us those auditory clues that trigger relaxation, or memory, and they say, ‘This is what a summer night sounds like.’”
More developers and cities need to hear that sound, to listen to the wildlife around them, and to include it in every project from this moment forward, because it is already almost too late.
Very interesting