Boskoi
FoAM seeks to promote human-plant interaction in a variety of ways. Boskoi is one such tool for this purpose: a mobile phone app that helps you map and navigate the edible landscape. It offers detailed information on wild food sources – their location, edible parts, medicinal and culinary uses. It is a database of ethnoculinary and ethnobotanic knowledge. Based on Ushahidi (an open source project allowing users to crowdsource crisis information via mobile), the app can also handle mail, SMS, tweets and uploaded pictures.
In the Netherlands the countryside is dominated by industrial agriculture; the level of biodiversity in a city like Amsterdam is actually significantly higher than in rural areas. In the perception of the general public, however, it is still the countryside that is associated most keenly with a true experience of nature. By visualising the richness of urban wildlife and the vital green arteries coursing throughout the city, Boskoi encourages its users to reexperience the urban landscape as an entangled, multilayered wilderness.
Created: 18 Oct 2011 / Updated: 23 Oct 2021
