Neuperlach for the Animals – A Participatory Species Walk

With playfully staged design methods, the walk opens up new perspectives on the city as a shared living space for humans and animals as well as strategies for future-oriented urban design.

On a joint walk through Neuperlach, we use playfully staged applications of design research methods to question our existing perception of the city and expand it to include the perspective of non-human city inhabitants. Central to this is the consideration of how we can design the habitat 'city' to create a livable environment and urban community for human and non-human species.

Using a participatory-performative approach, we will re-experience certain places along the city trail and perceive them with all our senses. We will discuss these experiences and observations with experts from other disciplines in order to focus on strategies for sustainable urban space design.

The walk thus connects to current academic discourses (e.g. multispecies ethnography, urban ecology, human geography) as well as to contemporary practices in design, architecture, landscape design and urban planning that aim to strengthen the resilience of cities and their inhabitants to the challenges of climate change (e.g. animal-aided design, climate- and species-friendly building, urban planning and landscape design) and poses the question of how we want to live in cities in the future.

The event is a cooperation between UnDesignUnit, BeeTree Monitor, Studio Animal-Aided Design and the lighthouse project "Creating NEBourhoods Together" in München-Neuperlach for the New European Bauhaus (NEB) by the European Commission.