Project

The Polish project Biodiversity of livable city: Species extinction and survival as cultural heritage is part of the international project Extinction as cultural heritage? Exhibiting human-nature entanglements with extinct and threatened species. The Polish team works in cooperation with Norwegian and British institutions.
The climate crisis and the ongoing devastation of the natural environment are to blame for the ongoing extinction of different species. Complicated relations between endangered and new species (newcomers, mutants) and, in particular, the inter-species communities which are emerging in the urban space may be treated as natural and cultural heritage. The project’s goal is to identify these relationships in the wider context of current environmental threats and future challenges related to the development of high-tech cities. In the face of the ongoing devastation of non-human habitats in the city and the extinction of different species, the project puts emphasis on such processes as speciation and adaptation. Assuming that a living and growing city is a constantly self-modifying multi-species ecosystem, instead of focusing only on preserving and protecting older ecosystems, the project promotes interest in urban biodiversity.

The project is transdisciplinary and puts particular emphasis on art as a form of creating knowledge. As part of the project, selected cases of multi-species habitats within the city of Poznań will be examined by means of artistic practices, public debates, and scientific consultations. They are aimed at diagnosing the relations between the human and non-human inhabitants of the city in the context of new ecological networks, which emerge as a consequence of extinction and arrival of new, non-human inhabitants (animals, plants, fungi, bacteria). Invited researchers and artists will devise and share their own creative methods of studying urban multi-species communities. The project includes workshops, public debates, lectures, an art exhibition, and a book publication. The project started on 26 March 2019 and will end on 31 December 2021.