{"id":7120,"date":"2014-09-17T21:41:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T01:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=7120"},"modified":"2015-02-09T12:10:36","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T17:10:36","slug":"born-to-be-wild-sort-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2014\/09\/17\/born-to-be-wild-sort-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Born to be Wild (Sort of)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cCivilisation; it\u2019s all about knives and forks.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>\u2014David Byrne<\/p>\n

As a child I was not nature-deprived. I lived in small towns and villages in rural Somerset in England, and enjoyed nature study in primary school but I know that I\u2019ve never seen or experienced anything truly wild. I never will, and as a civilised ape I\u2019m really grateful for that.<\/p>\n

Left to our own devices most of us couldn\u2019t survive in the wilderness, not even in what passes for wilderness in its degraded form. Yet we need the wild, we evolved there, and as we can\u2019t experience it for real anymore we make do with controlled, vicarious \u2018wildness\u2019, most of which involves getting scared in some way\u2014roller-coasters, horror movies, going face-to-face with tigers in a zoo\u2026<\/p>\n

For those with nihilistic tendencies it isn\u2019t hard to argue that there is no longer any such thing as wilderness. If you define wilderness as natural environment untainted by human intervention and manipulation, then there isn\u2019t any because the damaging reach of industrial civilisation is literally global\u2014DDT contaminates Antarctic penguins<\/span><\/a> and the PCB contamination<\/span><\/a> of oceanic particulate matter in Antarctic waters is similar to the level of contamination in the North Sea .<\/p>\n

Real forests are wild. They are places where one can both be lost and wish to escape from. But are \u2018urban forests\u2019 truly wild? For all the talk of \u2018wild\u2019, the wildlife experience is no longer defined by lived experience, because the definition of \u2018wild\u2019 has escaped into the thickets of a wholly urban civilisation. \u2018Wild\u2019 is behind bars, \u2018wild\u2019 is on a screen, \u2018wild\u2019 is not something that most of the human race ever experiences any more. \u2018Wild\u2019 is vicarious. It\u2019s seductive and dangerous\u2014but not in the way that wild used to be, it\u2019s dangerous because it\u2019s encapsulated. Packaged in media. Mediated by packaging. The danger is in mistaking this domesticated product for authentic experience. Its teeth have been taken out, its claws are manicured and its hooves are muffled. The roar of the wild has been reduced to whatever you\u2019ve set the volume control to on the remote.<\/p>\n

If a million people can see a buffalo on TV, why would you need a million buffalo?<\/p>\n

Not enough animals in the frame? Photoshop a few more to fill up the space.<\/p>\n

\"Wild
Wild with a remote. Credit: Paul Downton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Which
Which one is real?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Virtual reality is rapidly becoming more interesting than reality\u2014it already is for many. The landscapes in Avatar<\/a> may have some passing resemblance to Earthly places, but they are much more fantastical. Much more fun to look at<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"64B287B7-EC13-4FF4-82C7-08EC6F98C36B@home.gateway\"We\u2019re clever creatures. Thanks to computer-generated imagery even the most run-of-the-mill children\u2019s animated feature movie can contain astonishingly convincing pictures of landscapes, plants and creatures. Imaginary landscapes have become routinely realistic, and for that we have to thank Benoit Mandelbrot<\/span><\/a> and his discovery that the apparent disorder of chaos can be mathematically described by the sublime patterns of fractals. He sought a way to define the geometry of trees and clouds and was successful. Now filmmakers can build mountains and fly clouds that are mathematically correct and we find ourselves unable to avoid falling for what is, after all, a scientifically sound illusion of authenticity.<\/p>\n

\"Avatar\"These experiences are literally unreal, and whilst they may teach us something about nature\u2019s fractals, they also disconnect us from the real world.<\/p>\n

Moving and shaking<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the scale of the planet, the disconnect between humans and the natural world is becoming more complete (and complex) by the day. Which is to say that if we fail to treat the biosphere\u2019s natural processes with respect then those processes won\u2019t \u2018respect\u2019 we humans. Our disruption of ecosystems is profound and getting worse, but we don\u2019t really know what we\u2019re doing. We can measure the increasing pollution of the atmosphere and track some of the changes in global systems that result, we can make an informed estimate of the number of invertebrates in the world compared with 40 years ago and establish that the population has almost halved, and we can pretty much count how many trees and fish we haven\u2019t got compared with, say, 50 years ago<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

We can point to all this data and tell corporate leaders, politicians and decision-makers \u2018hey! something\u2019s happening here!\u2019 but it means diddley-squat to most of them. Every day the world news services and financial gurus are exalted or depressed by a point or two shifting on the Dow Jones, the FTSE or the Hang Seng. Every day, these measures of economic health can trigger excited speculation on global progress towards either boom or bust or nothing much. Meanwhile, the inexorable decline of every indicator that describes the state of the natural world goes without comment because it doesn\u2019t mean<\/i> anything to most of the movers, shakers and commentators of sound-bite capitalism.<\/p>\n

At the scale of the city, the disconnect is at its worst. Apart from the wind, rain, snow and smoggy sunlight that might still have a directly experiential effect on their daily lives, most urban dwellers have no idea what \u2018nature\u2019 is. When nature is given acknowledgement in the media that acts as the average citizen\u2019s eyes and ears to the world, it\u2019s invariably sensationalistic\u2014floods, blizzards and heat-waves make the headlines. Nature looms up as something to fear and therefore something to control, to put back in its box, tidy up and get out of the way.<\/p>\n

But at the scale of the city we can make a difference. At the scale of the city we can design for connection of daily life with the rhythms of the planet. Although they might not produce true wildness (or wilderness) we can include urban forests and woodlands, street trees, parks and reserves to the mix of place and experience for all citizens. As many writers for TNOC have explained\u2014most recently Janice Astbury<\/span><\/a> in TNOC 7 September 2014\u2014there are many small ways to bring nature into the city and, crucially, bring people into the making of that nature. All of this is important, but there is a problem with the big picture; it\u2019s a problem that runs deep in modern culture: it is<\/i> modern culture, or, more precisely, the culture of modernism.<\/p>\n

Modernism, greenery and the dark arts<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet the legacy of modernism is mostly one of liberation. Modernism freed us from the shackles of stale thought and feudal relationships. It promised a new, more efficient society in which form followed function rather than moribund fashion and it tried to articulate a cultural framework that was simultaneously progressive and egalitarian.<\/p>\n

\"CFF50FDD-1C0F-486E-B5E1-8821C2BC497C@home.gateway\"But like all kinds of revolutionism it had trouble distinguishing babies from bathwater and its followers tended to distill subtle ideas into slogans and often seemed to get the wrong end of the stick. Whereas progressive modernist architects like the inimitable Frank Lloyd Wright<\/span><\/a> laid stress on working with nature to shape, inform and become integrated with architecture others, particularly those in the thrall of Le Corbusier\u2019s<\/span><\/a> ideology, saw beauty and purpose in the machine regardless<\/i> of context. For the many modernists and neo-modernists who carry the flame of Le Corbusier\u2019s aesthetic dogma, nature remains something to be trammelled and tamed, something to be denatured; and the city is their canvas and playground.<\/p>\n

The penchant of the modern modernist for covering buildings with greenery can be understood once you realise that the greenery they favour has been reduced to a product, delivered in industrially produced, neatly stackable plastic boxes. The gorgeous walls of manicured plant life that are now beginning to show as bold new brush strokes on the urban canvas present a beautiful illusion of nature in the city, but they are as far from \u2018wild\u2019 (and just as aesthetically precious) as the brutalist concrete that was the contemporary modernist fashion a short few decades ago.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong; green walls are wonderful and I\u2019m an advocate for them and for green roofs, but bringing nature into the city has to run deeper. It has to engage people in ways that are not entirely predictable or a result of following maintenance manuals for vertical gardening planters (e.g., the roof garden I designed at Christie Walk<\/span><\/a> was installed and is truly \u2018gardened\u2019 by the residents).<\/p>\n

\"Christie
Christie Walk roof garden photographed against the backdrop of neighbouring buildings\u2026\u2018green\u2019 but not wild\u2026Photo: Paul Downto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But cities demand a lot of command and control. They are the antithesis of wildness. Regimentation and regulation is second nature to city-making. The great adventure of civilisation was all to do with making human settlement stay in one place. Once you no longer move on when the seasons change or the water dries up or the food runs out or the excrement piles too high, you have to get organised in very particular ways. The dark arts of accountancy and bureaucracy are needed to measure out and distribute resources, allocate activities, keep track of individuals and avoid disorder. In order to protect the accrued grains, brains and wealth of the settlement, standing armies have to replace roving warriors. Farmers replace hunters and gatherers; gardeners and maintenance crews learn the discipline of eternal vigilance against the incursion of weeds\u2014those persistent front-line troops of the unfettered wildness that continually threaten to reclaim the city in the manner quite accurately portrayed in \u2018I Am Legend<\/span><\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"IAmLegend\"Readers of this blog would all most likely agree that a meaningful connection with nature is vital to human well-being but is that something that cities can really deliver? Parklands and green public spaces do introduce something of that connection\u2014wildflower meadows more than manicured lawns, perhaps\u2014but a prohibition against too<\/i> many people stepping on the grass becomes an essential part of the management strategy when population numbers and density begin to rise. The scale of the city is key.<\/p>\n

Small is\u2026wilder?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The historical city was much, much smaller than what we call cities today. Until fossil fuelishness blew them open and drove the machines that tried to kill them, most cities were, by today\u2019s standards, and in all cultures, tiny. The biggest cities were then, as now, the centres of empires, in Medieval times cities like Baghdad and Beijing were the world\u2019s largest with populations of just one million. Most cities held populations of only tens of thousands, they were dependent on somatically powered transport and could be traversed in little more than 15-20 minutes. Rather than sprawling suburbs, they were ringed closely by agricultural land woven into a matrix with whatever landscape was indigenous to the region. The city was set within a framework of nature that would have been obvious to all of its inhabitants, not in a consciously aesthetic way but simply as a fact of life.<\/p>\n

The modern reality is that the pre-industrial framework and setting has been reversed and nature, such as it is, often in a remnant or degraded form, is contained by cities and, by extension, their industrial landscapes. Enabling people to connect with nature is no longer about reaching out to nature but creating facsimiles of natural environments within urban systems that people can somehow reach into. Plunging desk-bound hands into soil can take place at the scale of a balcony flowerpot or a community garden. That the fuzzy-edged messiness of community gardens shows a tolerance for trial and error is part of their beauty. But can the city ever really embrace the wild?<\/p>\n

Regardless of the inverted morphology of the modern city-nature relationship, the key to any engagement by citizens with nature is distance. Wherever and however they live, any connection with nature should take place within a 5 to 10 minute walk. This was the distance from old city centres to their nature-girdled periphery and anything further becomes a journey rather than a stroll. There\u2019s something \u2018natural\u2019 about it. In the pre-industrial past, it wasn\u2019t much further to where the wild things were. I\u2019ve written before (here<\/span><\/a> and here<\/span><\/a>) about George Monbiot\u2019s<\/span><\/a> lucid proposal for rewilding\u2014giving nature the opportunity to restore landscapes by letting them evolve without the prejudices of human culture (TNOC, 21 August 2013<\/span><\/a>).<\/p>\n

Any attempts to free nature from the city run the risk of further alienating citizens from nature. Making cities compact and small so that they are embedded in nature, rather than vice versa, offers a strategy of sorts for enabling the return of the wild, but its realisation would be more than a little challenging at this stage of our evolutionary trajectory. Placing cities within sealed or semi-sealed structures such as giant domes (like Bucky Fuller\u2019s proposal<\/span><\/a> for Manhattan) might conceivably allow nature to be wilder, thriving outside the city limits, but that much separation of the city from nature has its own peculiar dangers.<\/p>\n

One thinks of the denizens of the Domed City in the 1976 movie version of \u2018Logan\u2019s Run<\/span><\/a>\u2019 who believed the \u2018outside world\u2019 to be barren and poisonous. For many city dwellers today the wilderness is already almost that alien and threatening. We need our children to grow up around natural history so that nature is not seen as alien or as Jennifer Frazer wrote<\/span><\/a> \u201cWhen kids do not grow up around natural history, they become adults who are not only ignorant of natural history, but who do not care about nature and view it as disposable and unimportant.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need a mess of help to stand alone.\u201d<\/em>
\n<\/strong>\u2014Brian Wilson & Jack Rieley<\/p>\n

The city is a collective creation. It can only exist because of a high level of co-operation between individuals. It requires society\u2014as does that most basic unit of human organisation, the tribe. (Families don\u2019t require society in the same way, they arise as an emergent characteristic from the demands of procreation and give few, if any, pointers as to how to organise collective effort.) The idea that individuals are, or should be, at constant war with one another in a battle for survival simply doesn\u2019t fit the observed reality of civilisation and its evolution from tribal roots. The scale of co-operation has grown rather than diminished. Published in 1902, Kropotkin\u2019s \u2018Mutual Aid<\/span><\/a>\u2019 made an early and eloquent claim for the inherently tribal, rather than familial, nature of human society and its imperative to favour co-operative behaviour rather than the \u2018red in tooth and claw\u2019 interpretation of Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution.<\/p>\n

That view was avidly promoted in support of laissez-fair Victorian capitalism by Thomas Huxley, in a kind of late 19th<\/sup> century precursor of late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher\u2019s nihilistic assertion that \u2018there is no such thing as society\u2019. She might as well have said \u2018we don\u2019t need cities\u2019, but that\u2019s another political assertion that doesn\u2019t bear analysis. Even as the craggiest, most individualistic survivalist packs his trunk with AK-47s and BPA-free cans of baked beans and powers off into the mountains in his military-surplus Hummer, he remains tied to the wheels of civilisation with umbilical cords of dependency that tangle their way through great, heaving masses of industrial infrastructure. None of that infrastructure would exist but for the invention of the city. The survivalist could not begin to reach the wilderness without a city to take him there.<\/p>\n

Paul Downton<\/strong>
\nAdelaide<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cCivilisation; it\u2019s all about knives and forks.\u201d\u00a0\u2014David Byrne As a child I was not nature-deprived. I lived in small towns and villages in rural Somerset in England, and enjoyed nature study in primary school but I know that I\u2019ve never seen or experienced anything truly wild. I never will, and as a civilised ape I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":7136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[300,273,298],"tags":[40,43,28,72],"coauthors":[159],"class_list":["post-7120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay-art-and-awareness","category-essay","category-essay-people-and-communitites","tag-architecture","tag-awareness","tag-design","tag-popular"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7120"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}