The Urban Leisure & Tourism Lab Rotterdam is in full swing. We are increasingly interdisciplinary in our collaboration with programs like Integral Safety Management, Landscape & Environment Management, and Animals in Sustainable Society. This broader approach aligns with our growing focus on working regeneratively: not just ‘reducing harm’ to the city, but building a society in which humans, animals, and nature can coexist harmoniously.
One example of this is the concept for the Goose Path that students from the Animals in Sustainable Society program developed for Zuiderpark. This interactive educational walk aims to help children discover how humans and animals share the city and what this asks of them. In this article (in Dutch), you can read how second-year Animals in Sustainable Society students worked on testing and developing this concept, and how a primary school workshop about ‘liminal urban animals’ made pupils aware of their shared living space with geese, gulls, rats, and hedgehogs.
The project doesn’t stop at these first steps: graduate student Fee Scova Righini from the Landscape & Environment Management program will now further investigate how we can actually realize and finance the Goose Path. This is how good ideas for the city move from paper to life.