The assumption that the end of Nature (cf. Morton 2007, Latour 1993) is not synonymous with the complete taming and negation of wildness (Lorimer 2015) is shared today by representatives of various disciplines. It is also entering more and more dynamically into the field of cultural urban research. What is responsible for this is, first and foremost, the intensification of encounters with wildlife, which is becoming an integral part of urbanity in the first decades of the 21st century. Whether it be the phenomenon of accelerated evolution of animals and plants (Schilthuizen 2018), the expansion of troublesome (Dudek, Jerzak, Tryjanowski 2016, Louv 2019) and invasive species (Pearce 2016), rewilding projects (Monbiot 2013) and examples of natural succession of wastelands (Jakubowski 2020) or the urban effects of climate change (Dawson 2019), wildness at every turn confirms what is inscribed in its very concept – namely the self-will, autonomy, and agency (van Horn, Hausdoerffer2017). This is accompanied by complex transformations of existing visions of dwelling, urban politics, and production of space, as well as natural science-dominated perspectives on environmental protection, urban nature management, or human-nonhuman cohabitation practices. In this perspective, wildness is no longer a specific and permanent state of a given spatial arrangement, but rather a “natureculture” (Haraway 2003), dynamic process – a geographical continuum (Van Horn, Hausdoerffer 2017) and affective “intensity” (Deleuze, Guattari 1987, Massumi 2002) – which, while shaping urban form, simultaneously plasticizes visions and imaginaries of the urban, allowing it to be conceptualized as an area of diverse “urban ambients” (Thibaud 2002, 2011, Tańczuk 2020) and zones of transition (Brenner 2016). As such – and contrary to frequent opinion – wildness is never pristine, unchanging in time, and independent of human beings. Nor is it something strictly separated from urbanization or modern subjectivity. On the contrary, treated as post-wilderness or wildlife, it lies at the heart of the modern world as something everyday and potentially democratic (Lorimer 2015). Indeed, the possible dismantling of anthropocentric “scopic regimes” (Jay 1988) and “distributions of the sensible” (Rancière 2004) seen as a result of the work of wildness opens up space for a range of hitherto marginalized but potentially innovative uses and inter-species relations (Hinchliffe et al. 2005, Tsing 2015, Haraway 2016, Gandy 2021), key aspects of which are mobility, conflictuality, and variability.
Our intention is to present the event of wildness by problematizing the “heterotopian” (Lefebvre 1991, Foucault 1986, Sloterdijk 2013) status of the places where the untamed and the domesticated or the feral and the cultivated, meet. We are also interested in the ambiguity of the phenomena that permeate such heterotopias and the diversity of practices and discourses centered in and around them. While recognizing the transformative potential of the natural-cultural process of wildness, we want to highlight and reflect on several related practical and theoretical tensions (cf. Cronon 1995, Whatmore and Thorne 1998, Braverman 2015, Wapner 2020, Bartel et al. 2021), accompanying, inter alia, projects of the “new wilderness” (Kowarik, Körner 2005, Pearce 2016, Jakubowski 2020) and nature conservation in crisis-ridden urban settings (Lorimer 2015, Büscher and Fletcher 2020). We also want to reflect on possible visions of ethics and politics that would inscribe multi-species wildernesses in new visions of a common world crystallizing at the intersection of grassroots action and hegemonic spatial politics.
We encourage the submission of original and critical texts that share a similar perspective on urban wildness. We particularly look forward to papers using non-anthropocentric and relational approaches that explore the research areas listed below:
Keywords: wildness, new wilderness, wildlife, nature conservation in the city, natureculture, new humanities, relationality, cultural urban research, heterotopia
Please send the articles by 15.07.2023 to the address: przeglad.kulturoznawczy[at]uj.edu.pl.
Editors of the thematic part:
Dr. Jadwiga Zimpel, Dr. Piotr Juskowiak
Cited literature:
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