WildWays 3.0:

California Connectivity

WildWays 3.0: California Connectivity is a Studio Report from the Spring 2024 semester at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design based on the option studio of the same name taught by Chris Reed and EDL Director Prof. Nina-Marie Lister.

This studio explores themes of peri-urban, rural, regional, and continental connectivity and resilience through the lens of wildlife and landscape infrastructure projects throughout California. Our work is grounded in the intertwined challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene—now understood as a global polycrisis. We engage in conversations, projects, and precedents that address our relationships with other species and the environments we share, on which our futures depend. We consider new and reciprocal relationships with the creatures that co-exist with us. We explore the conceptualization and development of new hybrid assemblages, new infrastructural ecologies, and new imaginaries that foster deeper relations, entanglements, and kinships between and among all of Earth’s inhabitants.

Importantly, this is not an anti-human endeavor; rather, and perhaps most profoundly, it is an attempt to re-establish lost connections, re-affirm the culture of nature, re-embrace the living world, and re-engage us as social and ecological creatures through the multiple lenses of all who dwell among us—from surviving to thriving and flourishing into an uncertain future.