Fallowing the Fabulation: Rewilding Central Park

Fallowing the Fabulation: Rewilding Central Park

“Fallowing the Fabulation” is a project that rethinks the positioning and purpose of “wildness” in the city, beginning with a design-research investigation of Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Vaux’s Central Park in New York City. Our research revealed that the practice of maintaining Central Park as a pristine and highly-controlled park product has significant negative impacts on both the humans performing this maintenance work as well as the plant and animal species that inhabit the park. This manufactured “nature” is then sold to the public for status and used to fuel real estate speculation around it—and with that, increased unaffordability and inequity for the local populace, to say nothing of unsustainable ecological practices. Our design proposal for Central Park introduces a new form of “wildness” to the city, produced by a new seven-year maintenance cycle drawn from agricultural fallowing practices that allow the land to rest and regenerate. Zoned areas within the park then rotate through the seven ecological regeneration stages, beginning with anthro-fallowing. The park is thus treated as a process instead of a final product, in which we (humans, plants, animals) can all participate in different ways. There is no end-result, only new patterns of growth that we speculate may emerge.