[POST BY LAB-TEAM 3]

Everyday practices as a starting point for Building for Biodiversity

Talking about sustainability, biodiversity and the eco-system we often tend to think at a large and abstract scale. However, in order to find ground for design questions, it may be useful to first look at a smaller and tangible scale of the already existing everyday life, for as a starting point is not something that we create, it can be found in our minds, lives, streets, today.

When looking at it this way, small cycles of everyday practices present themselves as containing key actions, moments and processes from which we can ‘hook onto’ cycles of flora and fauna in and around the house. Hence, these small, human scale practices, provide the opportunity to connect to an overarching ecological system while bringing ‘solutions’ into a human scale and scope.

To illustrate, a clear example of such practices could be found in the everyday food cycle, starting at the collection of food (‘where do we go for grocery shopping’ / ‘who is picking homegrown veggies and herbs from the (urban) garden?’); moving to the preparation and consumption of it (‘can we eat that pigeon?’ / ‘how do we clean our foods and kitchen tools?’); arriving at the stage of recycling (‘where does the waste go?’ / ‘who could be fed with it?’) that is mutually an end and a start of a new cycle.

When, as a strategy within our research, showing the ‘soft’, fluid human activity and urban program in the city, next to the ‘hard’, physical layers, we have the opportunity to achieve a more complete view on the eco-system as a whole, while responding to both questions of improving biodiversity as the practical everyday life.