More Than 100 Species in A Home

COINCIDENTAL SHELTERS: Put up birdhouses and bird feeders! Build bat houses! Install insect hotels! These are familiar mantras from humans who acknowledge the animals that dwell in urbanized areas. But how often do we acknowledge that the structures we build for ourselves often also serve as shelters and homes for animals? Many species are already synanthropic; in other words, they rely almost entirely on human-built conditions in making their homes.

DWELLINGS FOR SPECIES: The idea of building structures for animals is not new.[2] Civic buildings in the Ottoman Empire incorporated birdhouses into their facades. Towers to house wild pigeons were built in sixteenth-century Iran as tools to collect guano to be used as fertilizer for farmers.[3] In 1911, Dr. Charles Campbell built a thirty-foot tower for bats in San Antonio, Texas, as part of an experiment to combat malaria.

WELCOMING OUR NEIGHBORS: The planet is experiencing unprecedented biodiversity loss. The Living Planet Index has reported a decline of approximately 69 percent since 2022 in monitored wildlife populations around the world.[4] As humans begin to realize the precarious status of our fellow inhabitants of planet Earth, we can adapt our dwellings to respect our connections with nonhuman neighbors and community members.

CITY AS HOME: If the idea of home can be defined by a sense of belonging, which species actually belong in our cities? We know that cities are hospitable to some and not others. For many species (including fauna and flora), urbanization results in a loss of home and a rupturing of habitat continuity. How might we adapt our built environments to create a sense of truly belonging for our multispecies communities? We must recognize the animals that already live among us as part of our shared world and acknowledge that it is we who are guests when we build our homes among theirs.

Notes:

[1] See Matthew A. Bertone et al., “Arthropods of the Great Indoors: Characterizing Diversity Inside Urban and Suburban Homes,” PeerJ 4 (2016): 1582.
[2] See Pieter de Wilde and Clarice Bleil de Souza, “Interactions between Buildings, Building Stakeholders and Animals: A Scoping Review,” Journal of Cleaner Production 367, September 20, 2022; Rohan D. Simkin et al., Biodiversity Impacts and Conservation Implications of Urban Land Expansion Projected to 2050,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, 12 (March 22, 2022).
[3] “Pidgeon Towers of Iran,” Atlas Obscura, October 8, 2009, https://www.atlasobscura.com/ places/pigeon-towers-iran.
[4] R. E. A. Almond et. al., Living Planet Report 2022: Building a Nature-Positive Society (WWF, 2022).

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)