Photo credit: Brenda Maria Zoderer
By Brenda Maria Zoderer and Harald Wieser.
Imagine cities where nature isn’t just confined to manicured parks, but where wilder, self-sustaining ecosystems are allowed to flourish. This is the idea behind ‘urban rewilding’, a novel approach to bringing nature back into urban areas by giving it more space to self-develop. Cities around the world are exploring this, but a big question remains: how do local residents feel about it? Are they accepting of nature taking over more space, and could it impact different communities unfairly?
We surveyed 800 residents in Vienna (Austria) to explore this question. We presented people with different scenarios, looking at rewilding vacant lots or park lawns, and considering different outcomes like turning areas into ‘urban forests’, ‘urban wastelands’, or ‘urban wildflower meadows’.
We found high levels of acceptability for urban rewilding across all scenarios, especially for creating ‘urban forests’ and ‘urban wildflower meadows’. This suggests that bringing more wild nature into cities is likely to be supported by local communities. However, we also found that acceptability isn’t the same for everyone. It varies significantly based on factors like people’s use of existing wild spaces, their age, and whether they perceive their neighbourhood as deprived. Notably, adolescents and young adults, people who don’t frequently use wild spaces, and those living in deprived areas showed lower levels of acceptability.
What does this mean for putting urban rewilding into practice? We highlight two key takeaways:
1. It’s about ‘people with nature’: To gain support, rewilding shouldn’t mean fencing people out of nature. Instead, it needs to offer diverse ways for residents to experience wild spaces.
2. Context Matters: Rewilding strategies need to be flexible and adapted to the specific social and spatial context of different neighbourhoods. To ensure rewilding is fair and doesn’t worsen existing environmental injustices, it’s crucial to involve local communities in designing and implementing these projects.
In conclusion, urban rewilding holds great potential for making cities greener and more resilient, and the public seems largely open to it. But its success and fairness depend on actively involving communities and designing projects that fit local needs and encourage interaction with nature.
Relational Thinking 