Bee Hive-Way (Speculative Design)
The city is surpisingly full of animal life. Rats, pigeons, raccoons, foxes. It’s also replete with unique life-forms, such water bears and bees, bugs and various plants and flowers. Like any ecosystem, diversity is key for good health. The health of a city’s constituents also requires diversity of life. Tree-lined streets and foliage on the buildings, flowers in every green space, and overall more green spaces and parks. Regardless, the concrete jungle is unwelcoming to many life-forms. In order to restore and maintain the worlds health we need to learn to live side-by-side with other lifeforms, instead of paving over them, inviting them into our lives, perhaps literally into our homes. Small efforts have been made, such as conservating land and protecting wildlife in parks, or wildlife highway crossings. This is far from enough. For this project I speculated on what a future, multi-species city might look like.
Keep in mind that I am no ecologist, city planner, or general wildlife expert. All the same, I hope the outcomes are enough to spark some inspiration for the future. Bees pollinate flowers and produce honey. They fill an important and specific niche of the ecosystem. How could we make cities more bee friendly? Here are two ideas:
Bee-Hive Window Unit:
The first part of the project is the design of a bee-hive window unit that can be easily installed, much like a window AC unit, by apartment dwellers who wish to support healthy diversity, dwindling bee populations worldwide, and to perhaps have some city--home-made honey.
Bee-Hive-Way
The second half of the project is a series of plants that lead from one park/green space to the next park/green space. Flowering plants especially, which lead bees from small paradise to small paradise. This would require the sides of buildings and parts of the street to be planted.
The Bee-Hive-Way would require the city to place planters along building sides and across the top, in order to lead the bees up and down the buildings. Perhaps the city’s MTA will handle the work, considering it’s transit, even if it’s not for ‘human’ transit.
It’s possible that Hive-Ways be built following the subway lines, but above ground. This will lead the bees from important human gathering spots, thereby increasing diversity. In addition, this will allow commuters to see and understand which lines are which from above-ground. Commuters might follow yellow flowers to find the yellow line entrances. See below:
