New York, NY, USA
What is Urban Wilderness and how do you envision it? : The idea of urban wilderness is something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now. While the literal manifestations are the ones that immediately spring to mind (plants, wildlife, urban farms and gardens, etc.), I think that the essence of urban wilderness is about bringing the intangible qualities of experience that one finds in nature into the urban environment.
For me, this means a sense of spaciousness, calm, silence, slowness, and a deep sense of connectedness to the environment around me. It means the ability to tune in to my senses rather than having to tune out in order to function. It means a place where thoughts and movement slow and settle. It means that my mind and body open up, becoming receptive rather than protective.
What type of interventions would love to see to help shape Urban Wilderness? We’re interested in both the practical and the fantastically impractical.: In no particular order, I would love to see:
1. “quiet zones” within the city
2. plant life growing in unexpected places, out of the built environment
3. mass interventions in which, through the suggestion of the crowd, everyone is forced/encouraged to move much more slowly than they usually do
How would you practically teach and perform such an intervention? (and Would you be interested in leading it?): I think #1 and #3 would best be led as workshops where the participants collaborate to brainstorm/create the form of the intervention and then go out and implement it as a group. I would potentially be interested in leading this.
This post was submitted by Alexis.
wilderness as hashtag
New York City, ny
What is Urban Wilderness and how do you envision it? : Hmm. I see those two words as pretty near I could see it in a couple of ways.
1) If I’m defining it in a way that would be used like a twitter hashtag (narrow enough to have a high signal to noise ratio for most people) I would define it as exploring the human relevance of areas within a city that have escaped traffic or commercial purposes for long enough to establish a thriving ecosystem. I would think that this definition would bring on a lot of talk of public/private land use issues, squatting, foraging, and the extent to which human interest automatically equals habitat degradation. I would certainly think “fieldtrip with risk of arrest”– by far my favorite kind of fieldtrip.
2) If I were thinking about it within the loose parameters of my own weird little universe, I would think not just of an existing urban wilderness but of what new urban wilderness we could create. I would think of finding a violent way to overtake the strong arm of human interest/development with a more forceful wild menace (all I can think of right now is kudzoo, rats, and invasive species, none of which seem very pleasant but I think Jon and I came up with something else once).
I might also think of “city camping,” which is a term my brother and I came up with when we would sometimes sneak out of the house as teenagers and go camp under a bridge or in the bushes of a fancy Enron-baron mansion because we thought it was fun and we loved how the Houston sky looked super weird purple-yellow with all the sodium lights late at night.
What type of interventions would love to see to help shape Urban Wilderness? We’re interested in both the practical and the fantastically impractical.: n/a
How would you practically teach and perform such an intervention? (and Would you be interested in leading it?): n/a
This post was submitted by britta.