Urban green maintenance strategies in Eindhoven, Netherlands aim to maintain vegetation by removing spontaneously growing plants and categorizing such as weeds. Why do maintenance practices find some plants valuable, and others not? And if current maintenance is counter-productive to the growth of urban vegetation, what is maintenance then really maintaining?  This thesis unfolds the need for maintenance practices to encourage biodiversity and argues the urgency for a change of attitude towards urban nature.

The thesis functions as a herbarium, where plant histories become the arguments themselves against current maintenance strategies in the city of Eindhoven, Netherlands, and is printed with cyanotype, a method historically used for herbariums and for the first book to be illustrated with photographs by female botanist Anna Atkins (Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843).

The thesis has been reprinted and published with Timelab, Gent.

The notion of ”living” artifacts are explored through a series of experiments with cultivating cyanobacteria in different media, to investigate alternative multi-species relationships and care rituals within the human living room.

The experiments are part of a residency in the Material Aesthetics Lab, and have been summarised in the paper ”Is it dying?!: Considering death in Biological-HCI” in collaboration with PhD candidate Gizem Oktay.

Collaborator: Eindhoven University of Technology