Cities Are Already Rewilding – We Just Haven’t Noticed Yet

This is a guest article from Alex Mether. We're delighted to publish thoughtful essays like this. Please note that the opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and don't necessarily reflect those of Urban Wilding Hub.

The dominant narrative of urban wilding runs along the lines of cities as ecological vacuums where nature is absent and must be actively restored through human intervention. Let me begin by acknowledging that this framing has done real good - it has mobilised resources, changed policy, inspired people to look for nature and to bring nature into unexpected places. However, there are cracks in this narrative. Cities are not empty of nature. They are, as Gandy puts it in his documentary Natura Urbana (2017), thick with improvised, feral, overlooked ecologies. 

The Randstad (the Amsterdam-Utrecht-Rotterdam-Den Haag urban ring) in The Netherlands provides an excellent case study area for this topic.

Cities are not ecological blanks. In the Randstad, spontaneous reedbeds, brownfields, and transitional waterfronts provide important habitats. Dutch and European studies show that informal urban green space can hold substantial biodiversity, including rare species (Woźniak et al., 2022). But the pattern is not uniform: some abandoned or lightly managed sites become ecological hotspots, while others lose plant diversity as succession proceeds (Elliott et al., 2023; Paillet et al., 2010). 

The better question is not whether nature is in the city, but which forms of urban nature we choose to tolerate, maintain, or replace.

Being one of the most densely developed nations in Europe, the Netherlands has become (largely by accident) an outdoor laboratory for spontaneous urban ecology. Rose-ringed parakeets, introduced from Africa and South Asia, have become invasive in the Randstad, causing ecological and social issues, competing with native birds for nesting, damaging agricultural crops, and creating noise and hygiene problems in urban areas (DutchNews.nl, 2022; Sovon, n.d.).

White storks, once nearly extinct as Dutch breeders, have rebounded and adapted to the built environment, and are increasingly seen building nests on trees, roofs, and chimneys (Ooievaars.eu., nd).

The post-industrial waterfront zones of Amsterdam's northern IJ-oevers (where former shipyards have sat in partial transition for decades) and Rotterdam's Merwe-Vierhavens (M4H) (one of the last working port areas near Rotterdam's city centre (ter Avest, 2021) are exactly the kind of sites where urban ecology research predicts spontaneous biodiversity gains.

The evidence for why is consistent: in most cases, wastelands harbour more species than other urban green spaces, with area size, age, soil, microclimate, and vegetation structure as the dominant local factors (Doick et al., 2009). Crucially, the trajectory is not instantaneous. Diversity on urban wastelands is optimal when their size exceeds a few thousand square metres, when their age is between 15 and 20 years, when they are connected to other biodiversity reservoirs by vegetated linear infrastructure, and when the pressure of human activities remains low. 

If nature is already here, the question shifts: it is not how to restore nature to cities (nature never left) but understanding why ecologically diverse urban spaces within the decade do not simply emerge. What truly limits urban rewilding?

Urban wilding has a taste problem. Which species we celebrate as "rewilding" and which we call "infestation" is not always an ecological judgment - it’s usually a cultural one.

The Netherlands makes this especially visible. In a country that has engineered its landscape down to the centimetre, the most revealing urban ecologies are often the ones that arrive uninvited: spontaneous reedbeds, brownfield succession, birds and reptiles colonising industrial margins - species thriving in the gaps between planning cycles. That is the more honest face of urban wilding - not a neat restoration project, but a negotiation over what kind of city gets to be called cared for.

The Hierarchy of Welcome Species

The slechtvalk (peregrine falcon) nesting across Rotterdam are celebrated, live-streamed and given their own municipal web pages (NOS, 2024). By contrast, the rose-ringed parakeet (halsbandparkiet), widespread across Dutch cities, is frequently framed as a nuisance and debated in terms of ecological risk (Sovon, n.d.). Both are non-managed urban wildlife doing exactly what urban wildlife does. One is native and gets a webcam. The other is non-native and has a major publicity issue. 

The reintroduced beaver in the Biesbosch waterways has been met with widespread celebration as flagship urban rewilding (TEFAB, 2025), whilst the muskrat (present in Dutch waterways for a century and engineers of wetland habitats) is subject to a national investment of approximately €35 million annually in muskrat control, in one of the most intensive eradication programmes in Europe because it undermines flood dijk infrastructure (Cartuyvels et al., 2024).

Arcari et al. (2020) highlight this phenomenon as a "hierarchy in how, and more importantly which, nonhuman species are being represented" in urban nature discourse. The selection isn't random - it follows aesthetic and cultural values as well as perceived risk, and in the Dutch case, an additional layer: national water security infrastructure. The muskrat isn't persecuted because it is ecologically harmful in the rewilding sense. It is persecuted because it conflicts with the specifically Dutch political economy of water management.

If urban wilding only champions the beautiful, the native, and the culturally legible, it builds a filtered version of nature - one that serves existing preferences rather than ecological complexity.

So, perhaps the real question is: which nature are we willing to live with?

The tyranny of the lawnmower

The real barrier to urban wilding is not the absence of habitat - it is the social contract that says cities should look controlled, and the governance systems that enforce it.

Wilkinson et al. (2013) argue that sustainability outcomes will ultimately be determined in cities, shaped by the effectiveness of urban governance regimes rather than by ecological knowledge alone. This tension is clearly visible in how everyday urban landscapes (e.g. verges, parks, and infrastructural margins) are managed.

In the Netherlands, these spaces are not ecologically insignificant. Roadside verges alone form an extensive network of habitat, with studies indicating that a substantial share of native plant and insect species occur within them, including rare and protected species. At the same time, these landscapes are actively managed through mowing regimes designed to balance biodiversity with safety, visibility, and fire risk. Around 70% of Dutch roadside verges are mown annually, with frequency and timing calibrated to prevent obstruction of sightlines and reduce hazards such as roadside fires (Rijkswaterstaat, 2026). 

Reduced mowing frequency, phased mowing, and leaving parts of vegetation uncut have been shown to increase plant diversity and provide essential habitat for insects and other fauna. These approaches are increasingly adopted in pilot projects and institutional settings, where verges are mown only once or twice per year and sections are deliberately left unmanaged to maintain ecological structure (UU.nl, 2024). Yet these same examples reveal the limits of urban rewilding; while promoting biodiversity, managed grasslands do not allow for natural ecological succession, preventing transitions to scrub or woodland. 

In this sense, nature is supported - but within clearly defined operational boundaries. Spontaneous ecological processes are allowed to occur - but only up to the point where they remain compatible with infrastructure, safety standards, and public expectations of order.

This reflects a broader governance logic also visible in cases of returning wildlife. As Drenthen (2015) shows in his analysis of wolf resurgence in the Netherlands, the return of autonomous species into human-dominated landscapes prompts not rejection, but regulation (monitoring and zoning strategies designed to contain uncertainty and maintain control). The wild is accepted, but only insofar as it can be governed.

Urban wilding is not, at its core, a design or ecology challenge. It is a governance and culture challenge. The question is not what habitat to build - it’s what kind of city we are willing to inhabit, and who has the authority to decide what "cared for" looks like.

What does honest Urban Wilding require?

A movement serious about rewilding cities needs to say explicitly what it is asking people to accept - and build the cultural infrastructure to make that acceptance possible.

We must be specific about what "wild" actually looks like at various points in succession: not just a meadow in full bloom, but a patch in March that looks abandoned, a pond that's gone murky, a tree stump being colonised by fungi. The aesthetic discomfort is not a communications problem to be managed, it is the actual reality of the cultural shift that is required. Projects that hide this (by only photographing the good months, only showcasing the charismatic species) risk undermining the deeper goal. The urban wilding movement needs to explicitly acknowledge that wild spaces can often feel "messy or overgrown". The gap between these principles and wilding project publicity can only be bridged through honest representation in what is photographed and communicated.

The movement has the ecological knowledge. It needs to build cultural honesty alongside it - not as a communications strategy, but as a founding commitment.

Nature isn't missing from cities. The question was never restoration - it was always negotiation. What are we prepared to live with? Which ecologies get to stay? That is a political question, a cultural question - a question about whose preferences shape shared urban space. The obstacle to urban wilding is not primarily ecological - it is cultural. We already live in a rewilded city.

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References

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