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“With their parallel lives, animals offer people a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange.”
-John Berger
About
What should the relationship between humans and animals be within an ecological network of animate and inanimate nature? Historically the spaces and management of designed landscapes articulated socio-cultural relationships of people to animals, both wild and domesticated. This same consideration can reshape public spaces to allow for the fruitful co-existence of animals and urban dwellers during a time of diminishing biodiversity and mass extinction.
Wild Winnipeg is the wildlife monitoring component of a larger research project called Looking at people, Looking at animals created to examine the shifting relationships people have had with animals over time and potential implications for designed urban landscapes.
A concentration of infrared wildlife cameras have been distributed within a Winnipeg neighborhood to capture animal activity. We aim to show how the lives of urban animals parallel those of people and to heighten awareness of urban biodiversity over a period of two years from June 2020 to June 2022 through a combination of field research and public participation.
Our research aims to:
Establish a web-based public outreach process that engages city inhabitants in documenting animal encounters in Winnipeg.
Establish an urban wildlife monitoring program in Winnipeg.
Develop a case studies series focused on urban habitat regeneration and design.
Develop guidelines for species-specific urban habitat prototypes.
Evaluate computational methods for automated data collection and interpretation.
Evaluate the capacity for collaborative public projects to strengthen awareness and commitment to biodiversity.
Design and construct a series of Research by Design habitats as a basis for long-term field research.
The Wild Winnipeg
research team:
Kamni Gill: Cultural and design implications of interactions between people and animals in landscape architecture and urban design.
Mark Meagher: Digital design, data visualization and mapping, open data and open source methods in architecture and urbanism.
Matthew Glowacki: Ecological documentation, camera operations, website development and research in animals in landscape architecture.
Owen Swendrowski-Yerex: Ecological documentation, camera operations, public outreach.