Pigeon Shit as an Urban Design Flaw.
['Monument op de Dam' redesign. Interspecies design]As a result of the unintentional multi-species design of our cities, pigeon shit has become waste. Waste that litters our streets and damages our buildings.
Waste is a concept that doesn’t exist in nature. Nothing is ever just the end to something, there is always another cycle that starts or a cycle that is connected. Every output is also an input.
The concept of waste is something of our own creation, many of our manmade materials are unsuitable as ecological input. Unless we consider the islands formed out of plastic waste as something other than a pile of plastic.
How does something as natural as pigeon poo become as unnatural as waste? Because our cities have been designed without considering it as a multi-species design. Nature doesn’t get dirty, a city does. Pigeon shit on concrete suddenly becomes waste instead of fertilizer.
The city mimics the rock formations of the cliffs home to the rock dove incredibly well. Add to that an abundance of food and a handful of human-released pigeons as welcoming neighbours and any pigeon will immediately understand how this habitat must have been designed for them.
If we had considered the impact of our cities on other species, the arrival of the pigeon shouldn’t have come as a surprise. And it shouldn’t have created any problems either. If we don’t want pigeons to live with us, we could have designed the facades of our buildings in a different way. Something that is often being done now is to add pigeon-deterring spikes to the edges of our roofs and statues.
There is a more harmonious solution though, we could build gutters to collect pigeon faeces so that we can use it as a fertilizer again. If we insist on controlling where plants grow and where they don’t, we have to take over nature’s responsibilities. We could bring the pigeon faeces to our parks to recomplete the circle.
If that is too much work, we should probably accept the consequences of having some waste covering our streets. Or, alternatively, we could consider allowing weeds to grow more freely and stop considering them as ‘plants in the wrong place’. This way we would co-design our cities together with other organisms.
