Mapping a city’s green spaces is usually about massive parks or trees planted alongside wide boulevards. Thus, the tiny patches of green, like a small neighborhood garden, are almost completely left out of urban planning and policy decisions. Yet so much of a city’s ecological life actually happens in these overlooked corners – the small gardens tucked between apartment blocks, the forgotten strips of soil, the weed-filled tree pits, and the patches of dirt cared for by residents rather than the municipality. Because these fragmented landscapes are rarely brought into environmental policies or public discussions, they remain largely invisible, while actually doing the heavy lifting: sustaining local biodiversity, acting as green stepping stones for birds traversing the city, and reflecting decades of everyday community care.
The Urban Green Blueprint focuses on these overlooked places, treating them as living infrastructures where ecological processes, local knowledge and social relations intersect. They are sites where environmental change becomes tangible long before it appears in reports or planning documents. The project interdisciplinary team investigates how artistic research can contribute to understanding urban biodiversity and the conditions that enable it to flourish. Scientific fieldwork, public observation and artistic production become parts of the same research process, each producing different forms of knowledge about the city and its more-than-human inhabitants.
Ultimately, the project seeks to explore the stories about what becomes visible when we pay attention to the places where ecological knowledge is already being produced, often without being recognized as such.
Apartment block gardens occupy an ambiguous position in Bucharest. They are neither fully public nor entirely private, neither planned landscapes nor spontaneous vegetation. Most are maintained through voluntary care, accumulated knowledge and informal negotiation between neighbours. Despite their modest scale, together they form a substantial ecological network.
These spaces also reveal the contradictions of urban development: as cities become denser and temperatures rise, pressure on small green areas continues to increase. Biodiversity declines gradually, often without attracting attention. Some species disappear altogether, some become dominant through invasion, while others persist only in isolated pockets. It all comes down to the dark biodiversity around us: species that could inhabit a particular ecosystem under existing environmental conditions but are absent because of historical disturbance or ongoing human activity.
Understanding these changes requires more than ecological data alone. It also requires attention to the cultural, social and political conditions that shape urban environments. Which forms of care become visible? Which remain invisible? Whose knowledge is recognised when decisions are made about urban green spaces? What happens when ecological value is measured primarily through maintenance costs, real estate pressure or aesthetic preference?
The Urban Green Blueprint approaches these questions by creating a research infrastructure that brings together artists, biologists, and policy influencers to investigate the same environments from different perspectives. Scientific observation, field recording, conversations with residents, technological experimentation and artistic production become complementary methods for examining the overlooked gardens behind blocks of flats as a living ecosystem.
The project treats artistic research as a public practice of inquiry in order to reveal different ways of seeing the same landscape and create spaces for questions that rarely emerge when talking about urban planning.
The Urban Green Blueprint develops through a shared research process that brings together various perspectives to inform one another throughout the project, generating questions that none of the disciplines could fully address alone.
Field research begins with a series of small green patches across Bucharest. Together with researchers from the Institute of Biology Bucharest, the team documents plants, urban wildlife and ecological conditions shaped by climate change, fragmentation and everyday human intervention. The main focus is to observe the relationships that make biodiversity possible: patterns of maintenance, care and stressors, local adaptation, and long-term community involvement.
Alongside ecological fieldwork, artists investigate these sites through sound recording, photography, digital technologies and direct observation. They examine how different methods of sensing and documenting the urban environment reveal distinct aspects of the same ecosystem, while artistic means are research tools before they become artistic media. Artistic tools introduce alternative modes of attention, looking to enrich scientific observation from statistical data points towards more revealing qualitative nuances, all contextualized in the socio-ecological politics of the block gardens in Bucharest. Ultimately, artistic aesthetics expand the perspective from a position of detached observation to one of situated immersion, bridging the gap between cognitive knowledge and relational experience.
Throughout the process, research remains public. Field notes, interviews, documentation and reflections are progressively shared through an online journal, allowing the project to expose not only its conclusions but also its uncertainties, revisions and methodological decisions.
