Wild Ways: A Fifth Ecology for Metropolitan Los Angeles

Wild Ways: A Fifth Ecology for Metropolitan Los Angeles explores themes of connectivity, resilience, and landscape infrastructure through the particular lens of metropolitan-scale wildlife corridors and crossings in and around Los Angeles. It does so against a backdrop of the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene. This studio fosters conversations and generates projects that address our relationships to the non-human entities and environments around us; and the ways in which we might consider new and reciprocal relationships with the creatures that inhabit the fringes and wildlands of the city. In so doing, this framing allows us to explore the conceptualization and development of new hybrid assemblages, new urban ecologies, new urban imaginaries that foster new kinships (in Donna Haraway’s words) between and among all earth’s inhabitants. Importantly, this is not an anti-urban or anti-human endeavor; rather, and perhaps most profoundly, it is an attempt to re-establish lost connections, re-embrace the living world, and re-engage us as social and urban and environmental creatures: as noted above, it is an attempt to re-enchant the city through the multiple lenses of all who dwell among us.

Wild Ways: A Fifth Ecology for Metropolitan Los Angeles is a Studio Report from the Spring 2022 semester at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design based on the option studio taught by Chris Reed. 

Series Design by Zak Jensen and Laura Grey
Report design by Josiah Brown

Softcover, 174 pages, 17 x 24.5 cm