Wild Entanglements / Living With, Living Alongside
Metropolitan Boston 

This studio focuses on designing for human | non-human relations at the metropolitan periphery, on both local sites and within regional networks. In doing so, it explores themes of connectivity, resilience, and entanglement through the lens of wildlife and landscape infrastructure projects. The projects that emerge from this work will re-establish wildlife habitat in the context of dynamic human settlements and spaces, subject to water flows and flooding, and will offer accommodation for people (access, movement, gathering) in relationship to wild creatures and forces.

Our work will be grounded in the intertwined challenges of the global polycrisis, i.e. climate change and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene. We will engage conversations, projects and precedents that address our relationships to other species and the environments we share and on which our futures depend–and that operate across the scale of the metropolis. We will consider new and reciprocal relationships with the creatures that co-exist with us–exploring the implications of living with and living alongside those creatures and forces that exist in the world beyond our immediate human selves. We will explore the conceptualization and development of new hybrid assemblages, new infrastructural ecologies, new imaginaries that foster deeper relations, entanglements, and kinships between and among all of earth’s inhabitants. And we will do so on the remains of a peri-urban site, at the confluence of two altered rivers, in the context of existing, denuded, and former ecological and social networks in ways that re-establish space for water, wildlife, and people in relationship to–and in dialogue with–one another.

Importantly, this is not an anti-human endeavor; rather, and perhaps most profoundly, it an attempt to re-establish connections, re-affirm the culture of nature, re-embrace the living world, and re-engage us as social and ecological creatures through the multiple lenses of all who dwell among us.

We will draw on the writings and research of naturalists, ecologists, and theorists such as Jennifer Wolch, Donna Haraway, Robin Kimmerer, Timothy Morton, Erle Ellis, Nina-Marie Lister and others. We will study projects and projections for metropolitan landscape systems and infrastructure by innovative planners and designers, including Charles Eliot and Sylvester Baxter, James Corner, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Matthew Gandy, the Dutch Government, and Yu Kongjian. And we will engage physical, temporal, and geo-spatial modeling tools that will allow us to explore multi-dimensional aspects of time, space, and scale.