Urban Metagenomics: Towards Metrics for Multi-Species Design

Urban Metagenomics: Towards Metrics for Multi-Species Design

One hundred years ago the Spanish Flu infected 500 million people and killed somewhere between 3–5% of the global population. The aftermath of this epidemic created a reasonable fear of invisible microorganisms, and, as a result, a public health emphasis on sterility. In the built environment, it led to changes in frameworks of personal and public hygiene, limiting the number of people on streetcars and even rethinking the materials used in kitchens.

Today, this antimicrobial mindset still dominates our approach to the built environment and human health. In the United States, the majority of paint has antimicrobial components. Any organism that makes it through the filters in HVAC systems is unlikely to survive the hand-sanitizer stations throughout the open floor plan of an office.

However, microbiota make up a significant part of a human’s function — from metabolism to immune mechanisms — and literally keep us alive. Over the last ten years, many have become familiar with the so-called “human microbiome” and the understanding that human life is quite inseparable from microbial life; without the hundreds of species inside each human, there is no human.

The human microbiome is assembled through various social and biological processes and modulated by its interactions with microorganisms in the environment. It is an intersection of fleshy materiality (genes, birthing, bacteria), and social intimacy (bathing, breastfeeding, affection) and our built environments (homes, streets, public spaces). There is no doubt we are permeable, whatever, whoever “we” are. Microbes are border-crossers. They can constitute the environment and can alter it. Then, microbes come to constitute a socio-exposo-microbiome: the corporeal environment within the human body, directly related to the outside environment.

Given that 50% of the planet’s humans are urban dwellers, how are our design decisions for the built environment sculpting the microbiomes we interact with? They circulate and confound the inside of bodies, the outside world, and back again. How are these affecting our health?

This inquiry has led to the development of a nascent field called urban metagenomics: the analysis of genomes not of a specific species but of all the microscopic species in a given environment.

Thus the concept of environment has been exploded. Environments can be the natural world plus toxins, they can be genetic landscapes that span generations and geography. Environments can be global, extraterrestrial, and cellular. Environments can be people, and can be nonhuman species. They can be uterine, chromosomal, gut, vagina, skin, atmosphere. So affective that they turn the inside out and the outside is absorbed and incorporated in. Knowing this, how do we design spaces that embrace this continuum?

This workshop will bring together scientists, social scientists, and designers to have a speculative conversation about how to collaboratively apply urban metagenomics as a meaningful scientific practice and architectural paradigm toward improving human and microbial environmental health.

Organizers

• Elizabeth Marie Henaff
• NYU Tandon School of Engineering
• Amber Benezra
• NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Presenters

• Elizabeth Marie Henaff
• NYU Tandon School of Engineering
• Amber Benezra
• NYU Tandon School of Engineering