How to - Rewild

Typically sited in rural locations, very broadly speaking, rewilding is about restoring ecosystems, encouraging back species may have disappeared, and getting that a place into a state where an ecosystem is somewhat self supporting. In cities, it’s a little bit more complex. Firstly the notion of rewilding a city is a bit of a misnomer because there’s no previous quasi-natural state to which a city can return. So when talk about rewilding cities I talk about urban wildlife or wild cities.

Cities are already complex systems and if you’re going to try and change the human nature balance, you’re inevitably going to run into complex issues. There isn’t a whole lot of information about how to do it well in cities, and there are very few case studies of urban wilding success stories. Where they have failed, evidence has shown that it’s almost always because communities have not been sufficiently involved or motivated - the science of ecosystem restoration is quite well understood, but when you throw humans into the mix all bets are off!

I think there’s a question to be asked about why we should wild the city at all. In my opinion, wilding cities is the 21st century equivalent of the space race - it is the thing that we should be putting all our resources behind because it is fundamental to tackling the climate emergency. It is one of the best tools that we have for doing so, because cities make up such a massive proportion of our carbon footprint, so any way that we can improve them will contribute to tackling the climate emergency. London is supposedly one of the world’s greenest cities and full of parks, but in an aerial photograph it looks covered in concrete. We might like manicured parks, but we don’t seem to embrace natural systems.

The reasons for wilding a city are fairly straightforward, First of all, to improve biodiversity, which has all kinds of knock on effects.

Secondly, from a very selfish perspective, it helps to improve human health and wellbeing. It’s been shown again and again that birdsong improves our psychology and that environmental improvements contribute to our wellbeing

Thirdly, it helps economically. It’s been shown that when you wild cities, you can actually improve the the cost basis and you can save money.

Finally, and I’m really focusing on the selfish human perspective, it will improve our own survivability. We already know that if we don’t manage to achieve the targets set for tackling the climate emergency, if we humans disappear from the face of the earth there’s a decent chance that life will continue without us. So even if we forget everything else but think that we might want to survive, wilding is a way to help improve that chance.

I am an architect, and I was Creative Director on a project called Re:Wild Royal Docks, initiated by EdenLAB in association with Eden Project to develop a 10 year vision for wilding East London. Unfortunately the project is not now going ahead, but it helped develop key thoughts that I would suggest one should consider when urban wilding.

The first is that it’s important to consider what wild even means. The concept of wild means very different things to different people and can have radically different connotations for people from different backgrounds, perspectives, or cultures, suggesting a very different relationship to nature. You might think that everyone loves green citiesparticularly if you’re white and middle class - but there is no broad consensus about what it even means, or how it might be funded, implemented, designed, or maintained.

One person’s lovely wild meadow is to somebody else an unkempt, unloved bit of the city, forgotten and possible a waste of taxpayers’ money. A key thing to consider when starting an urban wilding initiative is to consider the diverse meanings and relationships that the word wild has to different people.

The second thing to consider is that when proposing to transform urban spaces to recreate or introduce wilderness, is to ask what is lost in the process? Dr. Bridget Snaith has shown that what might otherwise seem like unprogrammed green space serves quite different functions with different meanings across communities and cultures. So when you get rid of a park to create some new habitat, some may see a loss of a vital play and social space for their kids. When you remove something to put to put in place a wild habitat, the notions of what good taste are quite complex and I think it’s important not to assume everyone is just going to love the transformation of urban space when it’s already quite contested. People have many different desires and aspirations for what their urban spaces should do, how they should function, and what affordances that they might have for them.

The third thing is that as we try to coax non-humans back into our cities, and as we start to reframe our relationships to them, suggest that we must also become a little wild ourselves. We have to radically transform how we relate to non-human neighbours and embrace the complexity and the unexpectedness that wildness entails - this might even impact on the way we treat our neighbouring humans. For example, mice share our homes, they live in our walls, they eat the same food, and they even breathe the same poor air as us, and their cousins give themselves to medical experimentation. I think it’s time that we at least meet them halfway and embrace the interdependence and unexpectedness that being wild actually means.

Fourthly, as anyone who has worked in participatory projects knows, one of the best ways to get people onboard with something complex is to get them doing things together, to have some sense of agency, responsibility, contribution, and most importantly a sense of accomplishment together. So, in developing programmes for wilding cities, I suggest that it would be useful to consider all the different ways to get people to participate around the theme of wild as a concept - growing plants together, nurturing together, nurturing non-humans together, perhaps cooking and eating together - hopefully not eating the non-humans!

It’s even better if you can get non-humans involved in these activities. Human to non-human communication has recently shown interesting developments, we are getting to the point where we may begin to understand each other, and if we can start to understand each other a little bit better I think we could develop quite interesting propositions going forward.

Finally, you can’t just expect to roll out a wild city proposition and expect everyone to love it. All the evidence shows that if you don’t explicitly involve people in the governance of such projects, they’re bound to fail. This means getting people involved in active decision making from the beginning, or even better, try and figure out how to get non-humans involved. There are initiatives around the world where non-human species have been granted citizenship, and so I think that it would be interesting to consider all the different ways that this could be cascaded across communities of humans and non-humans.

In summary, my urban wilding considerations are:

1) What does wild mean to different people?

2) What is lost? What is being replaced when creating a wild urban scheme?

3) How can we become wild ourselves? How can we build on the idea of mutualism, not just between humans but towards an interdependence between humans and non-humans?

4) How can we design a whole scheme of propositions where we are interacting and accomplishing something together? Humans to humans, humans to non-humans.

5) Who gets to decide? How can we distribute decision making so that it’s not just individual humans, but groups of both humans and nonhumans?

There are two texts would like to draw your attention to. One is a pamphlet by the Zoological Society of London called Rewilding Our Cities* and was the first text I’d seen really to begin to summarise the challenges and opportunities in our cities.

The second is a book called Ways of Being* by James bridle, whose work describes the strides we’ve made in exploring our relationship to nonhumans, and explores different ways of communicating, interacting, and making sense of each other.

Usman Haque founder & creative director of Umbrellian

Trained as an architect, Usman Haque is the founder and creative director of Umbrellian, a London based design and build studio dedicated to transforming urban environments. His work embraces many disciplines, including design and architecture, the internet of things, urban community infrastructure, and large scale public art performance. Usman also heads up strategy and investment for Starling Technologies, a spin out from Umbrellium dedicated to pedestrian safety, and in 2021 was appointed as Creative Director of Re:Wild Royal Docks initiated by EdenLAB in association with Eden Project.