Water Buffalo Commons
Wallowing in Istanbul’s Postindustrial Pastoralist Wetlands
Water Buffalo Commons is a multi-year practice output (2023–ongoing) that comprises iterative spatial prototypes in conversation with the 8 buffalo herding villages of Istanbul’s postindustrial wetlands. These include herding corridor workshops to stitch fragmented common pastures back together, a co-designed herding boardgame, dairy-making tools, portrait campaigns across the city, and an itinerant festival (now in its fifth edition) to mobilise and shift policy, livelihoods, and public perception of this increasingly extracted and financialised urban periphery. The municipality’s logistical and communications support has scaled the work city-wide, the poster campaign has given visibility to herders and buffalo co-existence, while an inter-institutional working group is developing a regenerative grazing pilot and postindustrial pastoralism manifesto for damaged wetland conservation.
Project team:
Dani Burrows, Merve Anil and Kubilay Ercelep.