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Note: Urban Wildscapes book
Parents who butt in and answer for their small children are, I always find, intensely irritating. Faced with the environmentally unruly - be the site in question a ragged area of ground or a derelict building - we tend to respond a bit like that, forgetting to wait for the shy response or the quiet answer. It's as if everything must be smartened up - faces washed and hair brushed - before a place can be considered presentable.
Listening to the discussions at a symposium held at the energetic Garden Museum to mark the publication of the book Urban Wildscapes (edited by Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan) that analogy kept returning to me. It's all about a more accommodating, even patient, approach to a measure of chaos, guided by the...