ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 of Planning Wild Cities is entitled ‘We are the wild city’. This chapter engages with the prospects and potential for planning to live within our planetary limits in the city. Within environmental science and urban ecology, the language of ‘rewilding’ has provided a popular touchstone for conservation activities that seek to restore integrity to damaged environments by reintroducing species, attempting to revive extinct ones, or in the reconstruction of ecosystems. But does this go far enough? Despite our attempts to break down and transcend the divide between the human and non-human, the urban wilds remain negatively, passively, or weakly imagined in visions of possible urban civilization and futures. To address this will require a more thoroughly problematic glimpse of ourselves, past, present, and future – to politically re-discover and re-engage with the urban nature of our wild cities and ourselves. The chapter will be of particular interest to students and scholars of planning, urban studies, and sustainable development, and for all those invested in re-shaping our ‘wild’ city futures.
