In the past five years dystopic visions of a collapsing part of our ecosystem and the DIY local food movement have combined forces to exalt the humble bee as a new urban hero – deftly navigating the city’s concrete pastures and providing free pollination service to all flowering plants in its path. Not surprisingly, design proposals are starting to sprout up which incorporate the urban bee in different ways. Two diametrically opposite projects come to mind – the first being a pragmatic proposal for riverside renewal and community building in Oslo, and the second a fantastical vision involving bio-hacking and species modification.
In Palynopolis by Eriksen Skajaa Architects and Christina Charlotte Tolfsen a riverside park in Oslo is transformed into an apiary with strategically located beehive harvesting units designed to demonstrate the importance of maintaining biotopes in and around our cities. The apiary includes a community garden and the two will have “a strong social agenda as it will be possible for the public to take part in the honey production and to learn more about bees.” Marcus Schaefer, the head juror, and also from AMO/OMA comments on the proposal’s significance when he says “By suggesting a series of beehive harvest units to be placed in the green belt around the Aker River, which runs north-south through Oslo, the authors want to show the importance of counter-acting the decline of biotopes in and around our cities today…a first step for a new type of urban gardening, inviting the public to bring flowers and plants for pollination into these urban beehives along the Aker River in Oslo…The beekeepers in their white protective suits could be envisioned as shadows, urban ghosts, that follow any architectural event, perhaps even any project. A new type of awareness is then positively raised through this proposal.”
- Read the original article By Brendan Cormier / The Pop Up City
