urban
It’s 2031,ten years into the City of Chihuahua’s Agave Acupuncture program, an incentive-based municipal strategy to pair the reintroduction of desert scrub species with an urban social program. The sustainable urban agriculture economy has increased concurrently with populations of traditional species of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion. The desert scrub ecosystem – shrubs such as tar bush, mesquite and sagebrush as well as a staggering diversity of cacti, yuccas and agaves, dominates the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion. In fact, the range of one desert scrub succulent, Agave lechuguilla , is sometimes used to define the edges of the ecoregion. How might living with this regional landscape enrich human and nonhuman lives?
Condensers (black dots)spread urban acupuncture across Chihuahua
Imagined bat echolocation view of bat roost
These designs are a family of related ideas, seeds to inspire a diversity of solutions engaging the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman survival. Adaptive cohabitation design iterations, taken together and paired with policy change, have a chance to affect meaningful large-scale change. The project suggests a shift in design focus to value nonhuman species, and perhaps nonhuman entities in a broader sense, as clients is an important step toward ecologically net positive design. p
Plant-pollinator specificity resulting from coevolution is a form of heterogenous habitat; many diverse species are needed to support a diverse array of associated species. This exists on a species level (such as yucca and yucca moths), and at a genera level (one species of bat can pollinate many different species of agave, above).
Katherine M Boles, MArch (UNM), is a Lecturer at the University of New Mexico and a licensed landscape architect. Her research focuses on developing an adaptive architecture for cohabitation.
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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