(Re)wilding London: Fabric, politics, and aesthetics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Rewilding has become established as a new mode of nature conservation. There is a growing body of science, ambitious landscape‐scale plans, and increasing political will. But until recently, cities and the urban were neglected; the idea of urban rewilding seen as oxymoronic. Of late, however, there has been a shift, with growing enthusiasm amongst metropolitan authorities, civil society, and citizens in major cities like London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne, as well as smaller cities around the world. Noting a dearth of research on urban rewilding, this paper proffers an agenda for future geographical research into this emerging mode of urban nature conservation. The paper deploys the spatial‐optical metaphor of diffraction, which originates in feminist science studies, to explore how rewilding as a socioecological practice developed in rural areas is changed when it encounters the urban, drawing on recent work in urban theory to trace how the urban might inform a new model of rewilding better equipped for the novel ecosystems and political configurations of the increasingly urban Anthropocene. It begins by defining how the sociomaterial urban fabric diffracts rewilding's practices and principles. It then examines how the distinct political economy of cities shapes the power dynamics of urban rewilding. The aesthetic dimensions of urban rewilding are then highlighted as important factors shaping how this emerging mode of urban nature recovery unfolds. In conclusion, we note how the nascency of urban rewilding presents opportunities for geographers to prefigure a progressive mode of Anthropocene conservation, and we advocate an affirmative style of critique that allies with practitioners and policy‐makers. We establish future priorities for research into urban rewilding, including exploring minoritarian cultures of nature, comparative analysis of diverse cases, and examination of rural–urban linkages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".