Insect City by Ivan Juarez | x-studio

How to cultivate sensitive dialogues between nature and local communities in cities?

Insect City explores new approximations to reimagine the boundaries between human and nature, through a site-specific intervention that leaves spaces for new encounters. The landscape project proposes to improve community and landscape awareness towards new relationship with the surrounding environment, seen not only from an anthropocentric, but enriched from a biocentric point of view. With this approach, the intervention dialogues with the city landscape, opening alternative ways of cohabitation in our built environments.

The micro-habitats have been conceived in the public space of the city of Linz, Austria, in an undetermined urban fragment and transitional area where several bio-habitats and cityscapes are diluted together. On the one hand, the site is close to the Danube River and its industrial port; and on the other hand, the site is bounded by a disused railway and the elevated highway. Although the area is characterized as an undefined public space, the site is privileged for its biological richness, since it is located in a self-maintained urban meadow surrounded by houses with orchards and community gardens.

In this context, Insect City is conceived as a public bio-space. An abstract landscape composed of a series of geometric wooden pieces that aims to sensitize and raise awareness on ecological and biodiversity values.

Insect City aims to develop a broader dialogue and new approaches to the diversity of plant and animal life in urban habitats. In this way, the intervention interacts with the city landscape, creating new ways of coexistence between the natural and built environment. A new hybrid urban landscape, as a housing complex for our cohabiting insects: bees, wasps, beetles or bugs.

Insect City | Process

The process has been based on collaboration and reciprocity, through the close dialogue with the local community and supported with local scientific knowledge.
The pollinator project has been developed with the support and collaboration of the Architectural Forum of Upper Austria (afo), with the bio-consultancy of the Biologiezentrum, a biology center located in the city of Linz, which has one of the largest insect collections in Europe, dedicated to preserving, researching, documenting, exhibiting, and transmitting knowledge about the flora and fauna. In parallel, during the process, a neighborhood consultation was carried out, with the aim of disseminating the project among local residents towards their public space and surrounding bio-habitat.

• Project typology, in your own words: Urban Biodiversity Intervention (Microhabitats)

• All landscape architecture offices involved in the design of landscape:

Ivan Juarez | x-studio

• All architecture offices involved in the design:

Ivan Juarez | x-studio

• Other credits:

With the collaboration and support of Architectural Forum of Upper Austria (afo)
Bio-consultant: Biologiezentrum Linz

• Location of the project

Linz, Austria