Abstract

Urban nature in Bucharest is often experienced as background scenery, with birds and plants that city residents pass every day going largely unseen and unvalued. This paper presents a practice-based design research project that uses performative rules to invert traditional urban perception by pushing human participants into the background while bringing non-human cohabitants into the foreground. Originating from field observations alongside biodiversity researchers that revealed how familiarity of a place blinds residents to urban ecology, the project moved away from digital screen interfaces to eliminate the screen barrier entirely. In its place, it introduced a physical, interactive 3-dice framework containing 18 Fluxus-inspired performative scores. These scores translate complex ecological dynamics such as habitat fragmentation, acoustic interference, decay as shelter, and urban infrastructure hazards into direct physical actions. Exhibited publicly, the intervention demonstrated how initial hesitation among participants gave way to collective play, spontaneous helper behaviors, and improvisational score modifications. Participant feedback confirmed lasting perceptual shifts, such as re-interpreting urban noise through the lens of bird mating calls. We discuss the implications of these performative scores for urban infrapolitics and outline future directions for low-barrier and open-access distribution.

1. Introduction

Small urban green spaces and the birds that settle in them are often overlooked and undervaluated. While these creatures have the same rights to live in the city as we do, these pockets of nature are rarely recognized as their homes, and the plants and the birds are seldom seen as our neighbours rather than mere background scenery.
This project’s aim was to create a playful way of bringing our non-human neighbours from the background to the foreground. The project introduces performative inversion as a way of actively involving the participants, placing them in the background, forcing them to experience the city through the spatial, physical, and existential constraints of plants and animals.

2. Theoretical framework

2.1 Foregrounding the Everyday: The Mechanisms of Invisibility
Urban nature is largely rendered invisible by the perceptual habits formed in modern city environments. The disconnection between urban residents and their surrounding ecosystems often stems not from an intentional lack of care, but from a fundamental lack of attention and interaction: small green spaces, spontaneous plants, and urban wildlife are routinely categorized as mere background scenery rather than active co-habitants (Soga & Gaston, 2016).
This invisibility operates on several theoretical levels. First, urban design prioritizes human efficiency, infrastructure, and built forms, conditioning residents to filter out non-human elements as irrelevant noise or simple aesthetic decoration. Second, because everyday nature lacks the dramatic scale of wilderness or designated nature reserves, its micro-interactions, such as bird nesting, seed dispersal, or spontaneous growth in concrete cracks, go unnoticed during daily routines.

2.2 Nature as a Giving Cycle and Physical Vulnerability
A second key theoretical lens centers on how natural systems operate through continuous cycles of giving, shelter, and interdependence. In urban ecosystems, these dynamics are constant yet hidden:

• A living fruit tree feeds diverse wildlife, while a dead tree offers shelter for animals, food for insects, and nutrients for soil, often supporting more life after its death than during its growth (Franklin et al., 1987).
• Parent birds undertake intense metabolic labor, making 100 to 150 feeding trips a day to sustain their young (Naef-Daenzer & Keller, 1999).
• Plant and bird communities rely on complex warning networks, from underground mycorrhizal connections between trees to acoustic alarm calls among birds (Simard, 2018).

Human urban life has largely detached from these cycles, replacing shared give-and-take with infrastructure built purely for human comfort and control. To understand how to bridge this gap, urban ecology must examine not only species counts, but also the physical vulnerabilities and spatial limits that non-human species face, such as habitat loss, acoustic interference, and artificial barriers. Establishing a theoretical framework around these physical constraints provides the grounding needed to design interactions that bring non-human struggles into human awareness.

2.3 Infrapolitics and Spatial Resistance
Baudry’s (Baudry, 2012) framework demonstrates how informal, low-stakes interventions in public space can bypass municipal control, offering a theoretical model for how citizens can actively reframe and reclaim unmanaged urban nature. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1996) and James C. Scott’s theory of “infrapolitics” (Scott, 1990) - subtle, everyday acts of resistance - guerrilla and community gardening reclaim vacant or unmanaged spaces under the implicit ethos of "if you don't do it, we will".

Politically, this form of spatial resistance relies on non-destructive action, making it difficult for municipal authorities to oppose directly. It draws on détournement, the Situationist tactic of repurposing official infrastructure to let citizens experience alternative ways of occupying public space.

3. Research Questions

Building on this theoretical foundation, the project explores three interconnected areas of inquiry: experience design, urban ecology, and spatial politics. At the core of the design inquiry is understanding how performative rules alter human perception. How can Fluxus-inspired instruction scores invert traditional urban roles, shifting the human participant into a background presence so non-human elements take the foreground. What transforms a tree or a bird from mere background scenery into a recognized neighbour? Can direct physical embodiment of non-human conditions build ecological empathy? What lasting perceptual shifts stay with participants after the performance ends?

Ecologically, the research investigates how physical performance can translate urban survival strategies and environmental hazards into human awareness. The scores act as perceptual challenges into Bucharest's micro-habitats, in a non-theoretical approach. How can performative actions make visible the spatial constraints non-human species face, such as habitat fragmentation, acoustic interference, window collision and interspecies competition over limited urban resources?

Finally, the project examines the spatial politics of everyday green spaces. Drawing on the concept of infrapolitics, it asks how non-destructive performative actions can empower citizens to notice, value, and defend unmanaged urban green pockets. In doing so, it addresses the fundamental tension between "beauty and harm," exploring how design can navigate the joy of spontaneous urban greening alongside the ecological reality of invasive species.

4. Approach

4.1 Fieldwork revelations
During the initial phase of the project, I accompanied biodiversity researchers to inventory local trees and birds in small green spaces across Bucharest. By luck, one of our key observation sites was right in my own neighborhood, a place I had walked through hundreds of times. That experience marked a major turning point in how I perceived the nature around me, and the project's design methodology emerged directly from it.

I noticed a striking contrast: where I saw ordinary streets and familiar urban backgrounds, the researchers identified dozens of bird species, micro-habitats, fungal networks, and complex plant interactions. The nature was not hidden, it was simply unseen by those of us unconditioned to look for it. This highlighted the primary design challenge: how to disrupt habitual urban vision and make these non-human cohabitants visible.

4.2 From digital to analogue
Initially, the project was thought of as a digital, personalized treasure hunt delivered through a smartphone application. The intention was to make the experience widely accessible and tailored to individual users as they navigated the city. However, prototyping this direction revealed an immediate paradox: reliance on a screen maintained the very barrier the project sought to dissolve. Instead of looking up to observe trees, listen to birds, or examine spontaneous plants in concrete cracks, users remained anchored to their mobile devices, consuming nature as mediated digital content. To truly shift attention from the screen back to the physical environment, I decided to eliminate digital interfaces entirely from the core intervention.

4.3 Playfulness and Game Mechanics
To replace the smartphone interface, the project turned to game design principles. Games provide low-stakes, structured environments that invite experimentation, curiosity, and collective participation. Playfulness is essential for bonding as it breaks down social self-consciousness and lowers the threshold for engaging with unfamiliar or mundane surroundings (Sicart, 2014). By framing ecological observation as a game, the project transforms passive walking into an active, exploratory side-quest.Rather than delivering dry botanical facts or top-down educational instructions, game mechanics create a space where discovery feels organic, surprising, and shared.

4.4 Fluxus Scores
To explore how everyday perception can be disrupted, this project draws on the score-based traditions of Fluxus. Fluxus artists used simple, instruction-based performance scores to frame mundane actions as worthy of attention (Higgins, 2002). Theoretically, applying score-based prompts to urban environments offers a way to interrupt habitual human movement and force a shift in perspective. Under the premise that "to be seen is to be loved," generating active attention creates intimacy, and that intimacy can serve as the baseline for empathy and environmental care.

This score-based approach was synthesized into a physical dice game. Participants roll the dice to receive a performative rule that must be executed directly within the urban environment. The game is designed to be flexible: it can be performed individually or collectively and would ideally be activated in group workshops and urban walks.

5. Discussion

5.1 Playfulness, Collective Contagion, and Spontaneous Cooperation
During public exhibition, an initial social barrier was observed: participants frequently hesitated to perform strange, non-normative actions in public space alone. However, the game format lowered the threshold for participation. Once one or two individuals began executing a score, a social contagion effect occurred, encouraging even shy observers to roll the dice and perform.

Additionally, the physical nature of the scores sparked unexpected collective behaviors. For example, when one participant executed Score 15 (carrying fallen leaves one by one to construct a soft pillow shelter), surrounding visitors joined in carrying leaves without knowing the written prompt or asking for instructions. This emergent cooperation mirrors the implicit reciprocity of non-human ecosystems, where action draws collective response without language, proving that physical performance can generate immediate, embodied community engagement. Furthermore, participants felt comfortable improvising variations on the scores, treating the dice not as rigid commands, but as open invitations to play within the urban environment.

5.2 Perceptual Shifts Beyond the Performance
The primary goal of performative inversion is to alter how participants perceive the city after the action ends. Post-performance feedback indicated that the scores successfully altered participants' mental frameworks. One participant noted that after performing acoustic-focused scores, being in a loud urban environment no longer felt like mere ambient noise; instead, they constantly pondered how birds struggle to hear mating calls and establish territory amid traffic. By physically occupying the vulnerability of non-human life during the game, participants began re-interpreting mundane urban infrastructure such as glass walls, streetlamps, and traffic noise as active ecological pressures.

5.3 Holding Spatial Resistance
By drawing on Baudry’s concept of infrapolitics and Situationist détournement, the 3-dice system empowers citizens to reclaim how public space is used without resorting to destructive action. Scores like Score 10 (occupying a sidewalk crack and declaring an autonomous zone) or Score 8 (expanding one's body to occupy space) allow participants to experience the competitive resilience of spontaneous growth and invasive alien plants (IAP). Rather than presenting invasive species through abstract lectures on "beauty vs. harm," the scores allow humans to physically embody the competitive strategies of plants like Ailanthus altissima alongside the vulnerabilities of native birds.

6. Conclusion

This project demonstrates that moving urban nature from background to foreground requires a shift from passive observation to physical embodiment. By discarding digital interfaces in favor of a physical dice Fluxus game, the project successfully translates complex urban ecological concepts such as canopy connectivity, window strikes, acoustic overload, and metabolic labor into accessible, performative scores. The exhibition reveals that playfulness breaks social anxiety, encourages spontaneous collective cooperation, and leaves lasting perceptual shifts regarding how citizens view their non-human neighbours.

Future iterations of this research will focus on scaling access to the dice intervention. To make the project broadly accessible outside gallery settings, future work will focus on producing ultra-portable mini-dice formats that participants can carry with them, alongside open-source DIY print-and-fold templates. By lowering production barriers, the dice mechanism can serve as an open-access tool for schools, community groups, and tactical urbanists to continuously re-wire urban perception across diverse cities.

References

Baudry, S. (2012). Reclaiming public space through urban gardening: Exploring the spatial politics of guerrilla gardening in New York City. Urban Design International, 17(4), 282–294.
Franklin, J. F., Shugart, H. H., & Harmon, M. E. (1987). Tree death as an ecological process. BioScience, 37(8), 550–556.
Higgins, H. (2002). Fluxus Experience. University of California Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on Cities (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Trans.). Blackwell.
Naef-Daenzer, B., & Keller, L. F. (1999). The foraging performance of Great and Blue Tits (Parus major and P. caeruleus) in relation to caterpillar availability. Journal of Animal Ecology, 68(1), 39–50.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press.
Sicart, M. (2014). Play Matters. MIT Press.
Simard, S. W. (2018). Mycorrhizal networks facilitate tree communication, learning, and memory. In Memory and Learning in Plants (pp. 191–213). Springer.
Soga, M., & Gaston, K. J. (2016). Extinction of experience: The loss of human–nature interactions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14(2), 94–101.