“Artificial natures” can be understood as carefully constructed environments that emulate or reinterpret natural landscapes through deliberate design, technological intervention, and artistic imagination. Such spaces provoke rich dialogues between culture, technology, environment, and society. They challenge traditional boundaries between the natural and the artificial, providing fertile ground for artistic, architectural, and anthropological inquiry.
The increasing prominence of artificial natures reflects broader cultural and technological shifts that blur the distinction between reality and simulation. From urban parks designed to mimic wilderness areas to highly curated thematic amusement parks, from sophisticated digital landscapes in gaming platforms to immersive virtual reality environments, artificial natures have become integral to contemporary living and recreation. These spaces do more than entertain or decorate; they shape our cultural imagination, redefine our understanding of naturalness, influence ecological attitudes, and mediate social interactions.
Artificial natures exemplify how human desires, technological innovation, and environmental considerations intersect, creating hybrid landscapes that encapsulate the dreams, ideas, ideologies, and anxieties of our era. As such, investigating these spaces may provide critical insights into contemporary cultural narratives, urban planning practices, ecological ethics, and social dynamics.
We are very pleased to present contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including Negin Zandi Atashbar and Renée Tribble, who investigate, in their article Serious Games for Social Innovation: Reviewing Their Impact on Citizen Participation and Spatial Justice, the role of serious games in enhancing citizen participation and promoting spatial justice within urban planning. They argue that, by translating complex planning processes into accessible, interactive experiences, serious games empower marginalized voices, foster mutual understanding, and support inclusive decision-making. The research shows that while serious games excel at encouraging engagement, civic learning, and dialogue, their integration into formal planning systems remains limited and requires further development. Ultimately, the study positions serious games as complementary tools within participatory frameworks, offering valuable potential to advance spatial justice and social innovation in urban governance.
The next article is an in-house contribution from Andreas Siess, co-editor-in-chief of Urban Eidos, who follows an experimental approach bridging ethnographic and artistic research. His text From Primitive Hut to Children’s Forest Forts: Architecture, Play, and the Transformation of Wilderness into Landscape explores how children’s self-built forest forts serve as a contemporary re-enactment of the architectural archetype of the Vitruvian “primitive hut,” revealing an innate human drive to mediate between nature and culture. Drawing on European architectural theory, philosophy, and sociology, the essay outlines how these makeshift shelters exemplify core architectural principles—shelter, structure, and meaning-making—while transforming wilderness into personalized, meaningful landscapes. Through acts of playful construction, children engage in place-making, turning raw natural environments into microcosms of dwelling (in the Heideggerian sense) that reflect both individual creativity and cultural tradition. Ultimately, the essay asserts that these ephemeral structures are not merely toys or pedagogical tools but valid forms of vernacular proto-architecture that reveal architecture’s most essential and universal impulse.
Since the editorial concept of Urban Eidos embraces the tradition of artistic research, we are very pleased to publish a contribution from the collective fuse*, represented by Virginia Bianchi. Her essay fuse: Synthetic Botany – Reimagining Nature Through Creative AI presents a multi-year artistic investigation into the intersections of botany, artificial intelligence, and ecological speculation. Through three interrelated series—Artificial Botany, Unseen Flora, and Mimicry—the studio explores how generative AI tools can reinterpret historical botanical archives, fabricate speculative plant forms, and simulate hybrid organisms responsive to ecological disruption. Each project reflects a shift from documentation to imagination, employing GANs, StyleGANs, and diffusion models to reframe nature as a mutable, co-created narrative space. Ultimately, fuse*’s work demonstrates how AI-driven aesthetics can expand the conceptual boundaries of natural history, challenging perceptions of truth, evolution, and coexistence in the Anthropocene.
Last but not least, we present the research of Amrita Kaur Slatch and Rachel Bacon, who investigate, in their article Embracing the Damage: A Design Principle for Extractive Landscapes, the potential of damaged extractive landscapes as generative sites for design by analyzing cases in Germany, India, and the United States. They critique conventional reclamation practices that aestheticize or conceal environmental trauma and advocate instead for approaches that reveal and work with the damage. The text highlights how artists and designers can act as mediators, embracing ecological variability and multispecies entanglements to foster alternative, process-oriented engagements with post-extraction terrains.
Enjoy reading,
Karlsruhe and Steinberg in August 2025
Andreas Siess and Ulrich Gehmann