info@counterextinctions.com
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PROJECT LEAD
Conrad Cheung
Assistant Professor of 3D + Extended Media
School of Art + Art History
University of Florida
CIVIC PARTNERS
Alachua County Commissioner Anna Prizzia
Alachua County Office of Resiliency
DESIGN + DEVELOPMENT
Polymode Studio
Happening Studio
Nick Labate
CREDITS
workshop facilitation: Natalia Guerrero, Rachel Horn, Kelsey Barton, Essie Somma, Autumn Johnstone, Aurora-Pavlish Carpenter
archiving: Autumn Johnstone
illustration: Sarah Stander, Mehak Sandhu
outreach: Karina Ocasio-Irizarry
One Million Counterextinctions asks: what infrastructure do we owe the species that live alongside us? Undertaken in partnership with Alachua County Commissioner Anna Prizzia and the Office of Resiliency, the project is a city-level prototype for what it means to take public infrastructure seriously for nonhumans.
The project equips residents of Alachua County to confront the climate futures that nonhuman species face in 2045 and to design responses — habitats, tools, systems, possibilities nobody has imagined yet. Every design is community-authored, credited to its maker, and archived on this website, a permanent, open-source public database of multispecies infrastructure, with over 250 designs and growing, free for anyone to build. The project’s first installations will realize several community-generated designs at functional scale across public sites in Gainesville.
By 2045, rising heat, saltwater intrusion, habitat loss, and seasonal disruption will push dozens of local species past ecological thresholds they can’t come back from: carpenter bees too hot to fly, alligators unable to find fresh water, gopher tortoises with nowhere to burrow, and sandhill cranes stranded when neighborhoods flood.
No infrastructure exists yet for these conditions, and the species our lives depend on — pollinators, soil builders, water filterers, seed dispersers — have no seat at the table where it gets designed. One Million Counterextinctions changes that by equipping the public, not experts, to become the designers of collective, livable futures.
1. COMPANION + CONDITION
A flat-pack touring design station, engineered to assemble without tools and travel easily, visits locations across Alachua County. Participants draw a card introducing them to a local species and the climate scenario it faces by 2045, and design a response through drawing and writing.
2. CITY ASSEMBLY
Public outdoor workshops take place across Gainesville’s parks. Community members design responses in clay at large, flat-pack tables designed to reconfigure for each new site.
3. CHARRETTE
Community-generated designs are reviewed, combined, and developed into buildable proposals through an open process that draws on ecological expertise and responds to environmental conditions across Gainesville.
4. REFUGIA
Installations based on community-generated designs are fabricated and sited publicly across the city as permanent, functional structures for use and testing by local species. The archive remains open-source and available for anyone, anywhere, to build from and adapt for other cities.