ABSTRACT
Approaching urban sustainability—and restoration ecology more specifically—with a geographical lens allows for a range of pedagogical opportunities to better develop urban environmental understanding and rewilding projects within cities. This chapter explores the experience by the authors of the development of an upper-level undergraduate class that generated engagement with specific riparian rewilding sites within the city of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and outlines the course structure and its philosophical rationale. By using the lens of “place” to develop both the learning experience and the ecological interventions for the sites, the class demonstrated the prospects for multidisciplinarity, better human–environmental connections, and more culturally informed sustainable placemaking. The course emphasized the value of storytelling and various communication technologies to build deeper understanding of the place-based ecological interventions, help contextualize the work and, it is hoped, generate more durable environmental outcomes for the sites in question. The chapter also discusses some challenges of this approach, in particular the need to devote a reasonable amount of time for fully developing this model in practice.
