We have some ideas, but it seems as if it is more interesting to ask people what they think. We are fascinated by the great responses we have been getting, and feel that a dialogue about this topic is what is truly needed.
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3 Comments
Hmm. I see those two words as pretty near I could see it in a couple of ways.
1) If I’m defining it in a way that would be used like a twitter hashtag (narrow enough to have a high signal to noise ratio for most people) I would define it as exploring the human relevance of areas within a city that have escaped traffic or commercial purposes for long enough to establish a thriving ecosystem. I would think that this definition would bring on a lot of talk of public/private land use issues, squatting, foraging, and the extent to which human interest automatically equals habitat degradation. I would certainly think “fieldtrip with risk of arrest”– by far my favorite kind of fieldtrip.
2) If I were thinking about it within the loose parameters of my own weird little universe, I would think not just of an existing urban wilderness but of what new urban wilderness we could create. I would think of finding a violent way to overtake the strong arm of human interest/development with a more forceful wild menace (all I can think of right now is kudzoo, rats, and invasive species, none of which seem very pleasant but I think Jon and I came up with something else once).
I might also think of “city camping,” which is a term my brother and I came up with when we would sometimes sneak out of the house as teenagers and go camp under a bridge or in the bushes of a fancy Enron-baron mansion because we thought it was fun and we loved how the Houston sky looked super weird purple-yellow with all the sodium lights late at night.
i guess you could define UW in many ways…most obvious are the green references, urban farm, gardens, etc..
Maybe this is going off the rails but…
What if you look at UW as a kind of map, tracing products from there roots (no pun intended) to the end user–like restaurants that use only or mostly locally grown foods, fig trees in Williamsburg –used for jams at the 14th st. farmers market,
Maybe the products are non consumables–a hand papermaker growing fibrous plants for inclusion in their paper…wool
It is interesting to observe the different culturo-social definitions which people are placing on the term ‘wilderness’. An interesting read on the divergent attitudes to ‘landscape’ is IMAGINED COUNTRY; SOCIETY CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT by John Rennie Short. In it he addresses the concepts of Wilderness versus City versus Landscape, and then conducts Historo-cultural case studies in ‘English Novels’, The ‘American “Western”, and Australian Landscape Painting.
The qualitative and political connotations we attached to our definitions of an Urban Wilderness will greatly effect the outcome and methods we pursue to achieve it.