ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Cities are noisy, built up, paved over, lit up during the night, criss-crossed with roads and traffic and at all times inhabited by people. Yet nature in its modified form persists at multiple scales across diverse city landscape elements. The nature continuum seeks to represent the range of nature contexts that urban children could potentially experience. Parents provide vicarious experiences of nature through the books they read to their children or the films they allow their children to see, although the representations of nature in books and film are typically of pristine spaces, almost always rural. Attitudes of parents towards nature are crucial in determining the way in which they introduce the natural world to their children. Human values, beliefs and preferences drive the nature of our cities from the bottom up and the top down.
