Businesses, governments and citizens all have a role to play in supporting urban biodiversity. How might digital technology help? And how can we design more-than-human smart cities in practice and policy, and in ways that work for citizens?
Mosaic is a four-year programme of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral research and innovation that will deliver a step‑change in how we design, plan and build our cities for thriving multispecies cohabitation.
Funded with a £1.6 million investment through a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship awarded to Dr Sara Heitlinger, the research is investigating large‑scale transformation of smart cities from a human-centered perspective, to a more‑than‑human one. A more‑than‑human perspective of cities is one that acknowledges and designs for the interrelations between humans and non‑human others – including plants, animals, bacteria, as well as water, air and sensors – in urban space.
Furtherfield is collaborating to develop innovative and interdisciplinary methods such as multispecies Live Action Roleplay to decenter the human. These methods help to reveal values, needs and challenges in place-based communities which will inform how we design and plan more-than-human smart cities.
You can watch this video to get a sense of how it works.
Visit the Mosaic website to learn more about this project.
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