Rewilding The CityProject
Investigating urban rewilding initiatives, from top-down governance schemes to local community-based practices.
How are different groups taking active steps to make cities wilder? By elucidating the meanings and practices of rewilding in the city, this project asks how rewilding is refracted by the urban, and how the urban is refracted by rewilding. It investigates the role of cities in nature recovery more broadly and centres the importance of maintenance and repair in the production of urban wilds, bringing together contemporary literatures in political economy, posthuman geographies, and urban ecologies.
To this end, several case studies are harnessed to conceptualise urban wilds. Currently, these include: beaver reintroductions in the UK and Germany; forms of “low maintenance” gardening in Newcastle; and peregrine falcons. Further work will be conducted on less charismatic creatures and processes obscured from the rewilding discourse.
Jonny is currently conducting fieldwork on beaver reintroduction sites in Enfield and Ealing, London in collaboration with Dr Thomas Fry and Professor Jamie Lorimer. Alongside a series of illustrative journal articles, this research is designed to inform a monograph on rewilding cities.
Project outputs
- Society
Jonathon Turnbull, Tom Fry, Jamie Lorimer (2025). (Re)wilding London: Fabric, politics, and aesthetics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
Rewilding has become established as a new mode of nature conservation. Until recently, cities and the urban were neglected by rewilding discourse; 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. 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.
