Cities around the world, including our own New York City, have been referred to as “concrete jungles,” one of the only real associations to nature given to cities, along with having to battle with pigeons as you commute to school or work. Despite having small designated areas reserved for nature in parks, the city itself remains largely grey. Naziha Mestaoui, a light artist, has created a powerful statement through her creation of the “One Beat, One Tree,” a technological light art piece, in which she projects virtual trees onto cityscapes and a new virtual tree will bloom with every heartbeat of the viewer. In her statement regarding this magnificent art piece, she said, “‘I wanted to create an art piece using technologies to connect us to this immaterial value of nature… If we want technologies to reconnect us to nature, we just need to create it’” (Frank). Her statement represents the need to use innovations and technology to reconnect us to nature and to remind the world of the importance of our environment.
Technology is an important asset that will allow for nature and sustainability to coexist in a city. #bcsfh20https://t.co/Ekt7AaL1v4
— Naveera Arif (@NaveeraArif) October 11, 2017
This art piece can be interpreted to promote the use of the technology to help us stay in touch with nature as a part of the movement to create a more sustainable city. Sustainability represents a balance between the needs of the economy, society, and the environment, and technology can be a factor in properly aligning these seemingly different aspects of life. Currently, the idea of instituting enhanced hybrid green infrastructure into New York City has already become accepted as a plausible movement towards sustainability. The technology behind green infrastructure can support not only a movement to bring city residents closer to nature, but also a solution to solve the problems of urban water systems that have little to no infiltration of water into the ground, causing flooding from sewer systems during storms. Green infrastructure will be able to carry out the absorption that the concrete ground cannot, helping the city economically by better preparing it for absorbing large sums of water from future storms, which will decrease the amount of possible damage caused by floods and overflow of the urban underground sewer systems. Overall, technology and movement to achieve sustainability presents an option to cities to be able to support the environment and nature, while allowing the city to use it to its advantage and become more prosperous over time. With the implementation of green infrastructure, Mestaoui’s light trees could join actual trees in cityscapes in the future.
