Urban Rat Race
︎ Creator: Jeremy Grail
︎ Supervisor: Peter Yeadon
The iconic New York City brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), often vilified, is a grotesque yet vital participant in the urban ecosystem. These rats flourish in the byproducts of human consumption — garbage-strewn streets and subway systems, overflowing landfills, and neglected urban spaces.
Their existence is inseparable from human infrastructure, which would diagnose the brown rat’s proliferation as a symptom of our ecological negligence and urban hygiene practices. This challenges the traditional binary between “nature” and “culture,” revealing that our ecosystems are deeply entangled with many unfavorable species and so-called “pests” that play active roles in the environments we shape.
The cultural urban metaphor of the “rat race” vividly portrays modern life where individuals are driven by the pursuit of wealth, power, and status. Like rats in a maze, humans are trapped in a cycle of struggle and contention, striving to outpace their peers in a system built on greed, waste, and competition.
Just as rats spawn in the filth of human consumption, the “rat race” illustrates how society feeds on the endless pursuit of prosperity, often leaving destruction and exhaustion in its wake.
“Rat race” is a series of installations built within existing New York City transit infrastructure. These installations connect a network of protected rodent passages and controlled feeding stations, forcing human commuters to confront the unsettling realities of our environmental impact.
The installations encourage reflection on humans’ evolutionary role, as we head further into irreversible ecological scarring. This visual confrontation between the two species dismantles the illusion of human exceptionalism, urging us to recognize the brown rat as a valuable participant in our shared ecological narrative and open realistic dialogues on public health, climate change, and environmental degradation.
This work was discussed in NYC-Based Industrial Design Class Introduces RISD Students to Biodesign Pioneers.
︎ Supervisor: Peter Yeadon
The iconic New York City brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), often vilified, is a grotesque yet vital participant in the urban ecosystem. These rats flourish in the byproducts of human consumption — garbage-strewn streets and subway systems, overflowing landfills, and neglected urban spaces.
Their existence is inseparable from human infrastructure, which would diagnose the brown rat’s proliferation as a symptom of our ecological negligence and urban hygiene practices. This challenges the traditional binary between “nature” and “culture,” revealing that our ecosystems are deeply entangled with many unfavorable species and so-called “pests” that play active roles in the environments we shape.
The cultural urban metaphor of the “rat race” vividly portrays modern life where individuals are driven by the pursuit of wealth, power, and status. Like rats in a maze, humans are trapped in a cycle of struggle and contention, striving to outpace their peers in a system built on greed, waste, and competition.
Just as rats spawn in the filth of human consumption, the “rat race” illustrates how society feeds on the endless pursuit of prosperity, often leaving destruction and exhaustion in its wake.
“Rat race” is a series of installations built within existing New York City transit infrastructure. These installations connect a network of protected rodent passages and controlled feeding stations, forcing human commuters to confront the unsettling realities of our environmental impact.
The installations encourage reflection on humans’ evolutionary role, as we head further into irreversible ecological scarring. This visual confrontation between the two species dismantles the illusion of human exceptionalism, urging us to recognize the brown rat as a valuable participant in our shared ecological narrative and open realistic dialogues on public health, climate change, and environmental degradation.
This work was discussed in NYC-Based Industrial Design Class Introduces RISD Students to Biodesign Pioneers.
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