📑 Rewilding Cities

Inspired by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet’s discussion of banning cars in cities, Clive Thompson thinks about the idea of monocropping and the impact of rewilding beyond just nature.

In the same way that monocropping corn creates weaker, less resilient land, monocropping our streets with cars creates cities that aren’t as vibrant as they ought to be. We often don’t notice it, because we’ve trained ourselves to think of streets as “almost exclusively for cars”. But if you think of all the things you could do with streets, you realize how weird it is that we have, for decades now, used them mostly only for vehicles.

This reminds me of a piece that I wrote a few years ago about ‘rewilding education‘. Also, the suggestion of replacing roads had me thinking about the scene in Babakiueria where they propose replacing the freeway, a ‘baron wasteland’, with bushland. Of course, this is really a comical reference to the tendency to build on top of existing sacred sites.