Through this focus on wild urban nature, the research centres on spaces and lives that exist in human made environments, but are not actively managed, maintained, curated and controlled by humans. As such it excludes most city parks, managed green spaces and domestic animals. Instead, it focuses on ‘urban wildscapes’, which are ‘urban spaces where natural as opposed to human agency appears to be shaping the land, especially where there is spontaneous growth of vegetation through natural succession’ (Jorgensen and Keenan 2012, p.1). As Douglas Sheridan outlines, we could also see an urban wildscape as ‘any area, space, or building where the city’s normal forces of control have not shaped how we perceive, use, and occupy them’ (in Jorgensen and Keenan 2012, p.2). What is interesting about both of these definitions is the focus on ‘natural agency’ in relation to human agency and control, and the sense that an urban wildscape is shaped by more-than-human forces, despite its positioning within an urban landscape which is dominated by human controls, processes and functions (for further conceptual discussion of ‘wildness’ as a term, see Scott 2022).
In ecological terms this is what Ingo Kowarik calls nature of the fourth kind, which is created through ‘the natural development that occurs independently on typical urban-industrial sites, without horticultural planning or design. This starts with cracks in sidewalks or in colonization of walls and buildings as “artificial cliffs” and leads to growth in abandoned areas and to impressive urban-industrial woodlands’ (2005, p.22). Kowarik argues for the value in ecological terms of nature of the fourth kind, in that it is ‘fundamentally determined by natural processes just as it is in pristine forests’ (p.13). Within this research, wild urban nature also includes wild animals that exist in these and other city spaces, but which are not owned, managed or controlled by humans, including wild deer, foxes, bats, hedgehogs and birds.
I argue that the value of spaces of wild nature in cities and what distinguishes them from more curated, contained and managed green spaces is as follows:
- Wild green spaces in the city, which have developed in natural succession, are resilient, flexible spaces by their nature, revealing ways in which nature responds to and regenerates following human interventions (See Flyn 2021)
- Wild natural spaces provide vital habitats for city insects, birds and mammals
- Such spaces, particularly urban woodlands, are more immersive than those that are curated and managed, in that the unchecked growth of plants and trees creates environments that humans can ‘drop’ into. They are a marked contrast with and escape from the built environment
- Wild natural spaces track and reveal the changing of seasons in amplified and heightened ways, highlighting different rhythms, temporalities and ways of being than those privileged and valued in urban spaces, including commerce, business, consumption and fast, purposeful flows of capital, things and people
The research begins from a position of valuing nature in urban environments, while also querying some of the generalised assumptions about what it offers to city residents, and how this is judged and measured. The focus of the research is on encounters with wild nature in city spaces that hold and evoke contradictory feelings, including joy, wonder, awe, fear, grief and longing. Such feelings, I argue, can be particularly pronounced when encountering wild more-than-human lives in human-dominated environments for the following reasons:
- The encounters are often truncated, interrupted, curtailed and exposed by the human-made environment intruding upon that encounter
- These encounters with wild nature are always framed by the human-centred and dominated context of the urban built environment and how it is occupied
- There is a compression of space and time in the human-made city, which is at odds with timelines of wild nature and its cycles of growth and decay
- In the city, we don’t feel the ebb and flow of rural patterns of nature that we might drop into as a countryside hiker or deep-sea diver
- What we experience is not a smooth, continuous, cyclical flow of life, but eruptions and spasms characterised by both delight and dread, which are created by enforced encounters, where we are pushed together
- Climate breakdown, alongside the concurrent loss of species and habitats, fills such encounters with a sense of imminent loss, alongside a feeling of their preciousness and value
Despite these undoubted benefits for humans and more than humans, I also argue that some of the more practised narratives, which were amplified through COVID-19 lockdowns, as to the value of urban green spaces in relation to the mental health of humans, should be further examined. As I go on to discuss, this is about de-centring humans as the axis around which all arguments for the value of urban green spaces must revolve and rather adopting a ‘multi-species’ approach (go to this page for further discussion). It is about seeing wild lives and wild growth, in and of themselves, as a valuable end point, rather than what such spaces can DO for us. As Gallegas-Riofro et al. argue, thinking of nature only in terms of its benefits for humans is a deeply Western, colonial and extractive perspective, whereby ‘Nature is treated as a mechanism to alleviate mental distress and improve cognitive functions, rather than as an intertwined, sacred, fundamentally holistic entity’ (2022, P.9).
Finally, this research wants to argue for the value of complexity and ambivalence in artistic responses to wild nature in the city. Such practices can acknowledge and explore more troubled and contradictory human feelings about wild beings and how they live in the city. Simultaneously they can also draw attention to the divergent needs and trajectories of plants, trees and animals in urban environments, which may actively contradict and work against the human-made structures in which they are positioned. Both aspects can help us to think through how we live well together in the ‘multi-species’ habitat of the city.