Presentation short abstract

Cities are also becoming laboratories of rewilding. Comparing Berlin and Melbourne, we look at urban rewilding projects around ponds and wetlands, that become contested spaces where governance, ecology, and community values meet, and where new multispecies futures are being actively negotiated.

Presentation long abstract

Urban environments are often considered by scholars, policymakers, and the public as incompatible with conservation or rewilding efforts, which are typically associated with remote or sparsely populated landscapes. Yet, cities are sites where ecological restoration, species recovery, and multispecies coexistence are actively experimented with. We compared rewilding case studies around waterbodies in Berlin, Germany, and Melbourne, Australia. Through interviews with municipal officers, planners, scientists, and community groups, and on-site visits, we investigated how urban rewilding is practised in these two cities. In both Berlin and Melbourne, several rewilding efforts are changing social-ecological relations around small waterbodies, wetlands, and the blue–green infrastructures of everyday urban life. At the same time, competing visions of “nature in the city” emerge: some emphasize ecological function and autonomous processes, others prioritize recreational access, safety, education, or aesthetics. Urban rewilding exposes a deeper question: should cities continue to impose their order on nature, or should they imagine themselves as “cities in nature”? Comparing Berlin and Melbourne highlights some shared challenges like jurisdictional complexity as well as different opportunities shaped by natural history, city planning, culture, and local histories of community participation. Ultimately, we argue that urban rewilding is achievable and, in some cases, well under way as a situated and negotiated practice of world-making, where ecological futures are co-produced through political choices and social values. In both cities, current rewilding initiatives remain small, experimental, and often fragile, but these stepping-stone projects nevertheless offer practical lessons and imaginative openings for more biodiverse, ecologically autonomous urban futures.