DIY Nests To Encourage Bird Life In Cities
The Nest Project wants to encourage bird life in London’s inner-city areas by enabling citizens to create their own bird nest.
With rapid urbanization patterns worldwide, concerns about a ‘loss of nature’ start to develop. While green space can positively affect our physical and mental health, a lack of it may endager a city’s biodiversity. Offering up parks and ponds in favor of highrise condominiums or roads may scare away some ‘urban’ wildlife.
Robin Howie, founder of London-based design studio Fieldwork Facility, has a particular interested for urban interventions that create relationships between ‘communications’ and ‘experiences’. In relation to a growing presence of urban environments and the demise of urban wildlife, he invented The Nest Project: a project that encourages bird life in inner-city areas, making neighborhoods nicer places to live and work. The nests are designed in such way that they can easily be attached to street lights and furniture, integrated into urban environments.
Not only do these nests act as homes for birds, they are also urban interventions that trigger human awareness and involvement. The nests start out as pencil sharpeners in the the homes, offices, and schools of people. By sharpening their pencil, people can contribute to the building of a nest. Once a nest is ready, it can be attached to street furniture in their neighborhood. Participants in The Nest Project are encouraged to share nest locations to a public database, so that others can keep track of the bird life in cities and simultaneously can explore the city through a different lens. What’s even cooler, is that some nests have a camera: they can ‘tweet’ (ha, I see what they did there..) footage of nest activity.
The Nest Project is a citizen-led project designed for citizens to encourage bird life and requires their support in order to succeed. If it turns out that these nests are positively contributing to bird life in urban areas, future projects can be thought of where such ‘nests’ are used in measuring air quality for example, as Robin Howie notes on his website.
