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It sounds like an oxymoron—urban rewilding—and perhaps it is. When “rewilding” entered conservationists’ vocabulary in the early 1990s, modern cities were its antithesis.
The rewilding movement originated as a push for “big wilderness”: for the restoration of large, interconnected swaths of land and the reintroduction of “keystone species” to it. Keystone species are animals and plants whose presence is highly beneficial to their ecosystem, and whose absence triggers a cascade of destabilizing changes. Though keystone species in North America range from beavers to chestnut trees, rewilding emphasizes the need for large predators—wolves, cougars, bears and the like—whose need for large territories in turn justifies “big wilderness.”
Rewilding is organized around the “Three C’s,” Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores, where the cores are protected wilderness areas, and the corridors are strips of land or water connecting them. Cities hardly fit in as a fourth “C” in this vision. So why are the words “urban rewilding” increasingly cropping up together? There are a number of reasons for conservationists’ newfound interest in integrating rewilding principles into urban environments, some more fruitful than others.
There is no doubt that “rewilding” a city looks substantially different from rewilding efforts in Yosemite, Nam Phouy or the Scottish Highlands. Big wilderness and apex predators are impossibilities. People can’t be prohibited entry to urban green spaces. Urban rewilding looks more like transforming a former shopping center into a wetland park in Nottingham; like de-concretizing miles of the Kallang River in Singapore; like the hanging gardens of a new skyscraper in Sydney. Unnecessarily gray spaces are restored to green, and green spaces are incorporated into new development. There is no purity to urban rewilding: the balance of gray and green...