Growing Biodiverse Urban Futures: Renaturalization and Rewilding as Strategies to Strengthen Urban Resilience

Abstract

How are our cities using nature-based solutions to confront the challenges posed by a warming climate, the loss of biodiversity and major resource depletion? This article discusses the opportunities and benefits of applying the concepts of regreening and rewilding of cities. The article engages with key sources and summarizes the background and development of regreening and nature-based solutions and important policies, concerns and perspectives of international and national organizations. It introduces the integration of nature-based solutions (NBS) as a strategy in urban planning with the aim to strengthen urban resilience and to slow down the biodiversity decline. Rewilding areas in cities has become a powerful strategy to bring back butterflies, insects, birds, and wildlife. In contrast to highly managed parks and gardens, these rewilding initiatives are leaving allotted spaces mostly uncultivated and self-regulated. Contact to nature is essential for human existence, urban wellbeing, and good quality of life. Green spaces in cities—big or small—all contribute to the health and wellbeing of residents. However, many cities do not offer residents easy access to green space within the city. Improving the better distribution of and access to green spaces and extending gardens and parks is likely to deliver a large number of benefits, such as: ecosystem services, better water management for enhanced urban flood control, slowing down the biodiversity loss, contributing to food security, and restoring damaged ecosystems. Furthermore, additional green space and NBS help to keep cities cool during heatwaves and improve the urban microclimate. Rewilding has emerged as an important part of new public parks and gardens. The next step is to up-scale citywide climate intervention strategies deployed to keep cities cool. However, as the discussion of this article shows, it is essential that the design of these NBS strategies is fully integrated with other complementary planning interventions and seeks synergies across all sectors.

Floodplain Forests and Urban Parks – A Brief Comparison of Bird Diversity

“…Our results of bird survey in SS and BS urban parks in Olomouc city can be considered only as indicative, because of more precise results should revealed method of mapping nest territories, which has not been used because of time limit. However, our result from line-transect method using for bird counting are in accordance with studies, which found out a close relationship between bird diversity and size area of urban parks (Lepczyk et al, 2017), presence of native features in urban green areas (Kümmerling & Müller, 2012;Lehmann, 2021), and proximity of urban parks to natural habitats out of city´s border (MacGregor-Fors & Ortega-Alvárez, 2011).…”

Niche Analysis and Conservation of Bird Species Using Urban Core Areas

“…Birds are important components of urban landscapes, promoting ecosystem health [3]. They are also good indicators of the diversity of other animal groups and of habitat condition [4,5] because they are conspicuous, easy to quantify and quickly respond to habitat changes caused by urbanization [6,7].…”

Children's Green Infrastructure: Children and Their Rights to Nature and the City

“…Due to their informal and unrestricted character, rewilding cities provides stimulating natural elements which enhance the exploration and imagination skills of children (Henderson and Vikander, 2008 ; Gurholt and Sanderud, 2016 ; Bento and Dias, 2017 ). Also, rewilding means that nature takes its course and wildlife can flourish (Xie and Bulkeley, 2020 ; Lehmann, 2021 ). This solution may lead the opportunity to reintroduce lost biodiversity back into cities spaces and promote inter and intragenerational communication and a closer connection with nature, goals that can be associated with the Planetary Boundaries proposed by Steffen et al ( 2015 ), and its application to city level proposed by Hoornweg et al ( 2016 ).…”

“…Indeed, rewilding cities and enhancing biodiversity are essential processes for the promotion of CGI. This perspective implies a different approach than the one inspiring the creation of designated spaces for children, which tend to be highly structured, restricted and regulated, conditioning the exploration of space and the free play of children, especially for the most vulnerable ones (Lehmann, 2021 ). CGI, through its civic and participatory focus, aims to co-create natural areas by rewilding cities and creating open natural spaces that can be appropriated by children as their own, because children also participate in their design, together with adults and young people.…”