As part of his Cities Go Wild! project, Ian Florin conducted fieldwork in London between October 20 and 26, 2024. During his stay, he interviewed institutional and scientific stakeholders involved in promoting urban rewilding in the English capital. In particular, he visited a beaver reintroduction site and explored a project aimed at promoting ecological connectivity, which involves a local cemetery and a housing association.
This visit allowed him to gather key information about the specificities of urban rewilding and its perceived radicality, how the new types of spaces created by rewilding projects are viewed, and how urban rewilding is being used as an urban planning tool to enhance marginal spaces.
The Cities Go Wild! project explores pressing questions in urban rewilding, examining how it challenges mainstream conservation through pluralistic and radical approaches. It investigates how rewilding fosters new frameworks for human-nature relations by creating “unintentional landscapes” within cities and considers how rewilding aligns with low-cost urban planning models by leveraging non-human processes, fitting into the context of austerity urbanism.
In line with the EPFL Directive on the organization of responsible professional travel, Cities Go Wild! is a climate-friendly research project. All travel for fieldwork and conferences is conducted by train.