Already, cracks in the built environment of Manhattan’s City Hall Park are beginning to form. These cracks provide unique spaces and moments in the otherwise rigid park where generative relationships can be observed forming between more-than-human allies and the built environment, humans and animals, and humans with each other. We wish to accelerate this process, leaning into and encouraging the organic “disruptions” and “violations” of the park’s plan. To do this, we will seed-bomb the entirety of City Hall Park, using a set of six 50-meter steel spires to pierce the soil and infiltrate the park grounds with the seeds and roots of native plants. These species will include heirloom fruit varieties that are native to, originate in, or were historically grown around the island of Manhattan, providing shared sustenance and a shared ecology to the animals that live in the park and the humans who visit.

Paying extra attention to the inter-species relationships that already exist in the park, we will later install a set of winding pathways that hang from the spires and only gently interact with the natural landscape, skirting through the new trees from understory to canopy. These paths are built explicitly to encourage visitors to wander and linger, rather than as rigid conduits from one street to the other. This careful separation will encourage new ecological and biotic relationships to form, inhabit, and deconstruct the existing segregation of human and non-human space, including affecting City Hall itself.