Quotations from interviews, depicting the research question addressed by the project.
| Interview question | Excerpt |
|---|---|
| If you had to formalize a question of your collection, what would the question be? | “The general question that we are interested in asking with the urbarium [sic] is what’s growing in our cities and why. There are so many different factors that have influenced the emergence and development of these plants.… There’s something really interesting about adaptation to the urban abuses that exist whether it’s very hot, very dry, very salty, all of these really extreme conditions that characterize the urban environment. These plants are thriving without any human intervention and under these crazy extreme conditions. It’s very interesting to think about them as a snapshot of a new type of ecology for the twenty-first and twenty-second century.” |
| What was the motivation for the project? | “There is one category of green which nobody pays for or actually uses which is spontaneous vegetation or weeds. … Why do we not use this? Why is this a different category? Why is nobody looking into this? … It’s actually what you could call urban nature, and why is this overlooked and can we at least see an opportunity in this? Can it have a different role in the city? Can it have a role in the city? And what would this role be?” |
| Can you go deeper into the issues you wanted to address or solve or communicate with the project? | “Trying to trouble those attitudes of ‘weeds’ being the same as trash. If the same as trash, then we want to cut it down, get rid of it, but what are we losing when we do that? And how might we start to shift that understanding by going a little deeper into what exactly is living there and starting to be really specific about context rather than ‘Oh, it’s all green, it’s all weeds. It’s all non-native, therefore it’s all trash.’ [Instead we could consider that] sometimes these plants might be classified as invasive, sometimes they might be problematic, but in a huge other variety of situations they might be positive. Let’s … start understanding those situations. …” |
| How would you frame your hypothesis? | “I would argue that spontaneous urban plants dial right into that matrix of patchwork spaces throughout the city which are contributing kind of performatively to the way the city is functioning, and often, what makes the plants themselves really interesting is that they are existing on the streets which are these natural connective threads that run through the city that connects these dislocated patches…so you can begin to see a system of patches, threads that begin to emerge and create corridors, and moments for wildlife to come in or for ecosystem services to function.” |