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Multispecies Neighbourhood / Oslo Architecture Triennale 2022
Matthew Dalziel & Ask Holmen

Hi-TEK Hi-den-city

This project explores an alternative future for human settlement that challenges the dominant narrative of high-tech, high-density human urbanisation with a high TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) and high den (multispecies habitats) neighbourhood model.

   The current biodiversity crisis is often framed as a struggle to preserve untouched nature. Conservation has become the process of removing humans from nature, and urbanisation is the process of overwriting nature with culture. Yet researchers have recently shown that as much as three-quarters of the earth’s terrestrial surfaces have been occupied and shaped by humans for more than 12000 years. This discovery challenges the notion of ‘untouched nature’ and reveals a more complex and ancient story of human presence on the earth. Humans are not ‘separate to’ but ‘part of’ nature. We have, until very recently, lived in ways that were neither urban nor rural, nature nor culture, but in a diverse set of ecosystems that included human and non-human beings in symbiosis.

   For many Indigenous cultures across the earth, this way of life centred around cultivated gardens where a wide variety of edible plants were gathered and tended to form biodiverse and high-yield ecosystems. Humans, in cooperation with non-human landscapes, created thriving neighbourhoods that were more diverse, more complex, and more resilient than they would have been without human interference.

   To combat climate change and biodiversity loss, a new form of agriculture is desperately needed. In response, ‘food forestry’ or ‘agroforestry’ as it is now known, is being rediscovered as a viable and important contribution to the production of not just food and building materials but also of thriving multispecies neighbourhoods that suggest a very different way of thinking about how we live and whom we live with.

   Use all your senses to explore this project that explores a possibly near future where human settlement is a positive player in the construction of thriving multispecies neighbourhoods.

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