Redrawing the Lines: An Exercise of Boundaries and Urban Interspecies Belonging in Miyajima, Japan

Abstract

Swarms of semi-wild, semi-tame Sika deer roam freely in both the primeval forested mountains and urbanized coastal town of Miyajima island. Rising deer populations and mass tourism has blurred the boundaries between human and deer territories, resulting in landscapes of intense interspecies frictions leading to declined deer health, human injuries, and degraded landscapes. Urgently, we must invent new ways of knowing and interacting with these non-human animals with whom we share a common habitat. This thesis asks: rather than pets or pests - could we recognize the deer as neighbours and co-inhabitants? How might we achieve this new perception of - and relationship to - the deer, through architectural and landscape interventions? A series of site functions and typologies are explored, testing methods of separation, stratification, coupling, and integration, in order to shift the human-deer balance of each site in sync with the seasonal flux of territorial needs. The explorations offer strategies for imagining alternate ways of interspecies living post-anthropocene.