Green Heroes: Dreaming of a green city

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Is it still possible to have a green city? Italian designers Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto have come up with projects inspired by fungi, algae and bacteria and have given rise to art installations, works of architecture and urban master plans.

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00:00We design architecture like living organisms.

00:07Many of the elements that are present in the air that our city produces, like CO2, NOx, PM2.5,

00:14these are pollutants for us, negative for human beings,

00:18but they are actually nutrients from other organisms, such as, for example, microalgae.

00:22It's not a question of simply using other organisms or integrating them into buildings,

00:31it's really creating an alliance with the non-human, a microbial world.

00:46I'm Claudia Pasquero, I'm co-founder and director of Ecologist Studio.

00:51I'm Marco Poletto, and I'm director and co-founder of Ecologist Studio.

00:57Ecologist Studio is a design innovation company,

01:01specialized in the advanced integration of nature in the built environment.

01:10With Ecologist Studio, we are trying to materialize the paradigm of carbon neutrality.

01:22The algae is a layer of nature that is pervasive.

01:26In fact, they are some of the oldest organisms on Earth,

01:31and so they have evolved an exceptional biological intelligence,

01:36which makes them, first of all, capable of surviving in very extreme environments,

01:42but also makes them extremely efficient at converting carbon dioxide into biomass.

01:51That's where we began to see a very exciting opportunity

01:55in terms of designing interfaces that would enable its cultivation in the urban realm.

02:06The project in Warsaw is called Air Bubble,

02:11and it takes the issue of air pollution and sort of turns it on its head.

02:17The ambition of the project is to demonstrate that it is actually possible

02:20to create a pocket of clean air where children can play safely,

02:25and do so through the application of biotechnologies.

02:31So the project in Venice is called Beat Biobot,

02:35and expands on the question of how we live together.

02:43We present a new form of azole that is inhabited by both human and non-human,

02:50and in this case, non-human are multiple species of microalgae.

02:58The azole and the pygmy, really, where the air gets changed by passing through these microalgae.

03:06Our hope is that our creations become a new interface,

03:11essentially between the natural world and the design or the artificial realm.

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