Scholarly record

THE ROLE OF ARCHITECTURE IN RECONCILING THE INTERESTS OF PEOPLE AND WILDLIFE IN CITIES

J. Kleszcz

Abstract

Animals have been present in human life since the first domestication of their species. Nature was encircling urban areas with its abundance, while being humanВ’s source of life and the greatest threat. With the development of urbanization some of the species inhabited humanВ’s settlements, while some remained in the wilderness surrounding the enclosed urban space. Uncertain man's situation caused aversion to "alien" in the city. The progressive development of the world's urbanization has made it difficult to talk about "wild", non-urban spaces in certain parts of the world. Most of the space outside the city has also been strongly influenced by human activity. At a time when nature was no longer threatened, when man departed from the animalistic representations of deities, his relationship with nature was loosened until almost complete disappearance in modern days. Nowadays also the approach from subjectivity to animal objectivity in art has changed considerably. The most obvious determinant of this is the departure of animal art into urban public space and its apparent and already seemingly permanent connection with urban art. At the same time, the city creates a kind of hermetic environment to which they do not have or society would prefer not to have wild animals living on the boundary of urban space and nature. This is shown by regularly occurring media coverage of the "incursion" wildlife, wild boars, deer etc. Apart from the traditional model of urban art, objects and spaces referring to the presence of animals, both wild and domestic, are created in the wider context. These include cyclical social initiatives that are a form of urban sculpture, happenings and social events such as Animal Estates and Edible Estates by Fritz Haeg, to visualize spatial interventions of the original destination of given urban areas as habitat for particular species, such as works of Gitta Gschwendtner and her Animal Wall or Ben Faga's work: If you build it up, they will come ... or finally urban sculptures for mutual or shared recreation like Spontainous City in the Tree of Heaven and the Super Kingdom of the London Fieldworks group, City Dog Adventure by Maartje Dros and nesting boxes, nibs and bird feeders by Vincent Bos. That is also why this paper is intended to present in a synthetic way the transition from subjectivity to the objectivity of the role of wildlife in urban space and architecture, and to show the diversity of its present forms.

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