Wild and the City

Abstract

Celebrating the aesthetic, ethical and ecological values of alleged ‘spontaneous nature’ is therefore a recurrent mandate in many projects and inspires numerous urban policies. Someone adopts this perspective as the only one possible for the ‘salvation of the cities’, marrying the reasons of the most orthodox ecology with a sometimes fideistic approach. Someone else embraces the cause of the fusion between wildness and urbanity for new opportunistic marketing operations in the global urban trade, interweaving the religion of environmental sustainability with the enhancement of biodiversity, often understood as a real capitalization. Still others, on the contrary, look at this phenomenon with suspicion and skepticism. All of them, in any case, build an increasingly broad and full-bodied debate on what we might call the wild city.