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My City = My Body
Only a small amount of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we swallow are taken up in our bloodstream, most of them pass through our bodies into the city's wastewater. Since wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove pharmaceuticals, the contents of our medicine cabinets eventually end up in the drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food we eat and the drugs we take.
I branded tap water from three different areas: Notting Hill tapwater benefits from the highest density of organic shops, tapwater in the city of London is enhanced with various stimulants and Golders Green 'produces' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
This branded tap water was then sold on a sunny Saturday morning on Broadway market and people were asked to also put their tap water on the map, speculating it's special qualities. On the project website, people also added stories about their tap water to the map. The result is a new map of London, revealing potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.
This is part of the 'My City = My Body' project, a design research project on how the rise of bio-technologies might influence our future interaction with the city. In this part, I created a series of public interventions to critically engage the audience in a future scenario, balancing fiction and reality.
download the big map (A0)
visit the project website on www.londonbiotopes.com
'Urban biogeography' is the study of the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time. Maps and data of these urban biotopes might influence property prices, council tax or the cost of your health insurance. Urban biogeography enthusiasts, both amateur and professional, make use of emerging technologies to measure local city-body ecologies. One of the techniques often used is 'sewage monitoring'. This tool allows one to pump up a tiny amount of sewage into the little bottles and scan it for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, all without even having to lift a manhole cover.
The tool uses synthetic biology* to detect oestrogen, anti-biotics, viagra or prozac: modified bacteria-solutions in the bottles change colour when detecting the chemicals or hormones. Since synthetic biology is both open-source and modular, the tool's functionality can be extended by downloading the DNA code for other detectors from a database on the internet.
This is part of the 'My City = My Body' project, a design research project on how the rise of bio-technologies might influence our future interaction with the city. In this part, I used this speculative scenario and fictional application of synthetic biology as a starting point for collaboration and confrontation with the department for Bioengineering at Imperial College in London. Many thanks to James Chappell and Vincent Rouilly at Imperial college for the bioengineering and introducing me to the wonderful world of Synthetic Biology.
My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city. The increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will fundamentally change the way we interact with each other and our environment. Today, DNA is a tool for identification, you can have your DNA analysed over the internet and we are creating new types of bacteria by reprogramming its DNA. But what does this mean for tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? And what will our new interactions look and feel like?
In search for these new biological interactions with the city, I started looking into Thames Water, London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company'. Making use of the Design Interactions work-in-progress-show, I staged an intervention, creating a map of London which contains biological information. Offering tapwater (kindly provided by Thames Water) I have asked visitors to donate a urine sample and give me their postcode, extending my biological map of London. Collaboration or not, it was often in the questions or laughs afterwards that interesting reactions came up.
