Blurred Boundaries
Home is more than just a place to live, it offers safety and comfort. For non-humans, home is a habitat. In the Anthropocene, driven by capitalism, habitats have been systematically destroyed. ‘There is no wilderness left on the planet’ (Nawratek, 2021), urban environments shared by humans and non-humans have become fragmented islands of biodiversity and vast agricultural land.
Once rich ecosystems of flora, fauna and fungi are now reduced to what Clare Lyster calls ‘surface accumulation’, where space is dominated by infrastructure and production rather than living ecosystems. Economic growth and industrial efficiency often overlook non-human needs, severing the entangled relationships essential to multispecies coexistence.
Even fragmented environments, ‘small isolated patches can make an important contribution to biodiversity’ (Lindenmayer, 2019). Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony, this project seeks to explore Trafford Park as a site for interspecies habitation and reimagines this industrial landscape as a space that balances human activity with ecological processes.
This project proposes the regeneration of a former weltand on a post-industrial site to restore ecological memory and resilience in response to the climate crisis through a posthuman lens. Influenced by James Corner’s Terra Fluxus (2006), it employs a speculative design method to challenge conventional boundaries. Prioritizing environmental over economic values, this project focuses on water management and habitat connectivity.
