The wishes will leave your head and walk around the neighbourhood. Let's meet in the plains next door.

CO HABITAT/SUPER COHABITAT

Can public places also consist of ecologically valuable, species-rich open spaces - as a CO HABITAT?

Is it a place at the cutting edge of time?  

Is it a possible public place in the city of the future?

Regarding these questions, Gabriele Sturm provides a stage for biodiverse vegetation in various places with her project.

She brings the issue of these species-rich biotopes as a CO HABITAT for all beings for the public and social space. CO HABITAT für alle Lebewesen – zur Diskussion.

With a viewing platform reachable by several steps, the artist staged an urban “wilderness” of biodiverse communities as a special sanctuary at four different stations.

The floor surfaces are arranged as glazing bars, between which the rain falls to the ground.

Glass allows daylight to continue to shine on the vegetation

This intervention, which barely touches the ground, permeable to light and water, addresses the concern to keep interventions as minimal as possible in order to implement concepts in coexistence with other forms of life, to keep the space diversely animated.

In her art actions, performances, and discussions, Gabriele Sturm keeps reconsidering the subject of the CO HABITAT from different aspects and discursively recontextualizes biodiverse and temporary vegetation spaces. She regards unplanned species-rich vegetations as sites in the urban landscape that add up to a living pattern of opening and closing spaces. Urban spaces in transformation are potential, yet unrealized, undefined sites whose areas are taken over by nature. A site not yet defined is a site of possibilities. Gabriele Sturm’s project is aimed at exploring the ecological, experiential, and, most importantly, social relevance of biodiverse habitats for our quality of life in the city, offering opportunities of discovering a paradise together at every station of the project.

In the SEESTADT ASPERN, Vienna's new urban district, public spaces are a central component. Therefore, the Seestadt is particularly suited to the question of how public spaces can offer a new quality of life as CO HABITAT, not only because they bind greenhouse gases, particulate matter and pollutants to a high degree, but also because a common habitat consisting of biodiverse plant communities with as many living creatures as possible offers a complementary option to the cleared, species-poor urban green spaces.

Large-scale planning was done for the new district. Many buildings are already inhabited, and new building areas divided into grids vibrate with color and continually transform themselves. Some of these grids are cultivated, others are populated by wildflowers. A juxtaposition of newly planned green spaces and many temporary biodiverse vegetation spaces lets us revisit the question at this site of how we can allow public spaces to emerge as a CO HABITAT - a biodiverse vegetation space that allows habitat for "all" living things, including the antrophogenic, on an equal footing - i.e. a SUPER COHABITAT, or integrate it into existing public spaces and green spaces. Various microhabitats on roadsides, field edges, public green spaces to balcony flowers, vegetable garden designs, parts of the Edible Seestadt, etc. allow these habitats to be understood as a SUPER COHABITAT and united into a network of biodiverse habitats.

Gabriele Sturm* Osttirol, lebt und arbeitet in Wien
Quelle: KÖR