Natalie Jeremijenko
OOZing
Project Area: Culture and Politics
Natalie Jeremijenko’s OOZing asks what forms animal-human interactions might otherwise take in a truly operative urban landscape. A continuation of her ongoing efforts toward realizing OOZ, a series of animal-human interfaces which up-end the traditional zoo with their architectures of reciprocity, OOZing challenges designers, planners, and policy-makers to more radically incorporate and reimagine the role of nonhuman organisms in the design and management of cities: What does biodiversity look like in New York City? Who wants to share the urban context with nonhumans and why? What are the present and possible roles for animals in urban infrastructure? Can human/nonhuman interactions be productive, fun, and improve the environmental performance of human habitats?
While urban migration once described the movements of rural poor human populations into cities, the term can now describe the movement of animals, formally known as wild, into urban centers. Geese, pigeons, coyote, rhinoceros beetles, luna moths, raccoons, bats, and wild turkey have increasingly accepted invitations for cohabitation that every street tree and greenspace arguably extend -- colonizing diverse urban habitats, forcing us to account for the environmental services they provide, and provoking us to re-imagine our relationship to natural systems in an increasingly urban world.
During her fellowship at Van Alen Institute, Jeremijenko will organize a public workshop to demonstrate productive cohabitation with urban nonhumans through a series of human-animal interfaces proposed specifically for the Bronx.
For more information about Jeremijenko’s ongoing OOZ work, and other related projects, visit http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/ooz.
