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‘A New Model for Bio Park’ A Radical Zoo: a collaborative and co-evolutionary model of education in and of nature

Steven Heywood

This thesis began by framing its research enquires through questions asked by the zoo design expert Jon Coe in his lecture at the Future of Zoos Symposium in Buffalo, New York titled ‘Design and architecture: Third generation Conservation, Post-Immersion and beyond’ in 2012. He asked: ‘Is it time for nature-based facilities to re-examine their philosophies? How do we seek common grounds [between animal, nature and human kinds]?’ David Hancock in his book A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future (2002) shared with Coe in alluding to a future model of zoos to be co-evolutionary and collaborative, merging zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, and natural history museum. Prompted by these questions, the thesis aims to examine radical new models of ‘zoo’ that departs from its previous forms of contained and controlled places of exhibition (see-only), education through separation, leisure and consumption. By examining an array of recent theories and cases studies, the thesis questions the relevance of nature-based facilities in terms of their role in education, and seek radical redefinitions as both depository of existing knowledge and laboratory of new knowledge. These new radical zoos readily incorporate new technologies and modes of living, traverse urban and rural contexts, and expands beyond previous modes of territorial and disciplinary confinement. Furthermore, the radicalisation and expansion of inter-contextual zoos in turn offer to overcome antithetical relations between city and countryside, between natural and artificial habitus, ecological and cultural domains of lives.