Change of perspective
Architects, urban planners and landscape architects make decisions about land use, usually without being aware of which wildlife habitats are being preserved, created, cut up or destroyed in the process.The aim of the "PerspekTIERwechsel" project is to establish the topic of wildlife more strongly in the spatial planning courses of the Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape Planning (ASL) at the University of Kassel - towards cohabitation or conviviality as an aspect of a socio-ecological society.
The urban architecture and planning discourse is anthropocentric. It largely ignores wild animals in the city and their needs. Animals are allocated spaces such as city parks or forests, but if they use other spaces, they are often perceived as problems that need to be solved by displacement, relocation or killing. Although the diversity of species and number of individuals in cities is certainly high, the impact of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture on wild animals is becoming increasingly apparent: In Germany, for example, an estimated 100 million birds die each year on glass and mirrored facades. Traffic infrastructure and light pollution hinder migration, reproduction and foraging. Energy-efficient building refurbishment can destroy habitats for building breeders such as bats, sparrows and swifts. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis and the extinction of species, there are calls from various quarters for a transformation of the social relationship between humans and nature, and in particular the relationship between humans and animals. Increasingly, planning procedures and methods are also being developed in architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture that preserve or create new habitats for animals in the city and enable cohabitation.
"PerspekTIERwechsel" makes it possible to focus on the topic of free-living animals in ASL in courses.
The building blocks of the project are:
- Urban ecological knowledge as a building block of multispecies cohabitation
- Testing and developing methods that make it possible to explore animal perspectives and the diverse relationships between humans and animals, to develop visions for changing human-animal relationships, cohabitation and participation approaches, to reflect on them and to transfer them into experimental transformation projects.
- Testing and development of transformative, sensitizing teaching & learning modules for integration into courses
- Integration of urban ecology knowledge and transformative methods and experiences in planning and design projects
- Mental health of students and teachers, e.g. through external support