For bees, sight and smell work together: colour attracts, scent guides.
Every flower releases a trail of scented molecules into the air, which pollinators follow like an invisible map, the problem is that in cities this map is slowly disappearing.

Air pollution alters and degrades the volatile compounds produced by flowers, reducing their intensity and range. In some cases, a scent that once travelled hundreds of metres now disperses within just a few dozen, making it increasingly difficult for bees to pick it up.

This observation is the starting point for Faux Flora, the project by designer Justina Alexandroff, developed during the Material Futures MA at Central Saint Martins in London.

The idea is a striking one: creating artificial flowers capable of guiding pollinators towards real ones. To do this, Alexandroff drew on the research of biologist Aditi Mishra and recreated the three features that many insects use to recognise a flower: a sweet scent designed to better withstand pollution; iridescent surfaces that mimic the way petals reflect light; a radial geometry achieved through CAD modelling and 3D printing.

These objects produce no nectar and aren’t meant to replace nature, they’re conceived as a kind of ecological beacon: artificial signals that help bees and other pollinators find their way back to real flowers, when natural cues are wiped out by smog.

It’s an example of biomimicry, a discipline that doesn’t simply copy nature but tries to understand its mechanisms in order to design solutions to contemporary problems.

Perhaps the future of cities won’t be about choosing between natural and artificial.
Perhaps it will be about learning to design the artificial so that it works in favour of nature, rather than against it.