REWILDING DEFINITION

AUTHORS

Carlotta Olivari Zhuqing Li Yuanyuan Huang

AALU LANDSCAPE URBANISM

Directors: José Alfredo Ramìrez Eduardo Rico

Studio Master: Clara Oloriz Sanjuan

Tutors: Liam Mouritz Claudio Campanile Daniel Kiss Teresa Stoppani

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to take the opportunity to thank our thesis advisors Clara Oloriz, Alfredo Ramirez and Eduardo Rico. We would like to express our sincere gratitude for the expertise, guidance, and the generous support. We would also like to thank AALU fellow classmates and our precious tutors Liam Mouritz, Teresa Stoppani, Daniel Kiss and Claudio Campanile.

We would also like to thank our external jurors for their help and directions. Particularly, Eleaonor Salter who helped and inspired us to further studies. Finally we would like to take the opportunity to thank Joe Stanley and Alastair Leake of the Allerton Project for the amazing insightful conversation, and Mark Tufnell from Calmsden Farm for the help and time dedicated, among the others.

All external sourced images have been labelled as "figures" with a detailed list of references provided at the end of each chapter; personal graphics are also sourced. Cover by Carlotta Olivari

REWILDING UK | ABSTRACT

In the UK, there is a dual opposition between nature and human footprint. The ongoing rewilding projects are prioritizing small wild areas creation over systematic and connective transitions at a large scale. The remaining land is mostly covered by conventional agricultural lands based on monoculture crops. This increases levels of soil erosion leading to extreme flooding hazards and loss of biodiversity. In this way, the research question of this project is how can we design an integrated strategy to rewild the agricultural land in a just transition? How to support farmers and ensure their voices are heard? Through a gradient of rewilding actions, the aim is to re-establish a reciprocal relationship between human and non-human processes in alternative productive landscapes based on agroecological schemes. This thesis firstly introduces the issue of the current UK’s land management and environmental crisis, then tries to use the concept of rewilding to respond to these issues. Based on the existing literature and practices of rewilding, it proposes a new definition of rewilding. After this, a basin spatial mapping tool and a local handbook are proposed to engage and provide knowledge to the farmers about how to create the clusters and rewild their farmland step by step.