Imagining and finding wildness in the city

What would it mean to invite true wildness into central urban public spaces? What solidarities can be forged between marginalised forms of both human and non-human life? How do they create spaces for flourishing, and transgression of the controls that urban regulation attempts to impose? 

These questions were raised for me by a curious paradox between the way ‘wild’ nature is described by the City of Paris in its aim to ‘vegetalise’ the city centre, and my own experience of already-existing wild spaces at its fringes. The current Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has spoken of creating ‘urban forests’ in key public spaces, ripping up concrete and stone to create dense clusters of trees, supporting biodiversity and fighting against the ‘heat island’ effect of hard-surfaced spaces in this densest city in Europe. The utopian architectural renders distributed to communicate this vision show a grove of trees outside Paris’ City Hall, with dappled shade and meadow-like grass merging seamlessly into the surrounding paving stones, interspersed with benches and streetlights. While butterflies flit, casual strollers and sitters pass through or stop a moment, their passage unhindered by the trees that forms a pleasant backdrop to kinds of public life that look much the same as they would in any urban square.  

Seeing this image over the last couple of years, I couldn’t help feel a certain cognitive dissonance with my experience and my understanding of the ‘real’ woodlands on Paris’ fringe. As a new Parisian in the summer of 2020, seeking connection with the city’s queer community, I headed deep into the woods of Vincennes. I was following the promise of a party I had seen being discussed on a private Facebook group organising temporary spaces of queer gathering, while the city’s nightclubs remained closed. On a hot summer’s night, having cycled as far as smooth paths through the woods would take me, I found myself pushing my bike through piles of leaves, branches catching on the wheels, tripping over roots, following a pin on a map without any of the normal urban landmarks that would guide me. I expected little more than a small gathering of people around a loud speaker, but it turned out to be much more than this: a mass of queer bodies pressing together, dancing and touching, more or less clothed. And as the night got deeper, I slowly discovered an alternate reality of raves dotted through the woods, pulsating with lights and music, organised for no other reason than the love of assembling, reminding me of the free parties I hunted across the countryside near my childhood home at the age of 17 and 18.

This night changed my sense of queer nightlife in Paris, how and where I could. It is not that the rules are technically different in the woods than in any other of the city’s open public spaces. More that they create a permissive zone, far from ‘civilisation’, even within the city, where rules are more easily bent, bodies can be freer, music louder. In the dense fabric of the city, things keep much closer to their channels: cars drive on the street, pedestrians walk on the pavement, dancing happens in a nightclub: different rhythms of movement are regulated and designed for. In the woods, a less controlled, liminal form of movement can happen, where a zone for a party is not pre-determined but claimed temporarily, transformed through the act of partying, and then left in its original form. Same for a picnic, but also for a bed for momentary lovers, or a makeshift shelter for a sexworker or unhoused person, all of which things that are common in the woods of Boulogne and Vincennes.

So, when seeing those renders of Hidalgo’s proposed urban forests, I wondered what goings on the city government imagined amongst those trees, or conversely, how they planned to stop them. When proposing ‘wildness’ into the city centre, are these forms of life also invited? Of course, things are not really so simple. The woods are not innocent. They do not offer the same freedom to everyone. And city-led rewilding is probably doomed to fail anyway. So how can we learn from communities of queer movement, from the way woods grow, from the kinds of movement they can harbour, and cultivate these processes towards an aim of justice in access to the kinds of mobility they suggest? 

Colonial wilds

When I proposed to the performer, scholar and activist Habibitch to present their performance-lecture Decolonising the Dancefloor in the Bois de Vincennes, I thought they might think it a little strange. But their response took me by surprise: “I’d love to do that. I need to exorcise the woods of their evils, for the sake of my ancestors”. The woods were grown initially as a hunting ground, so what appears, then, as a patch of virgin, autonomous nature within the city is more like a veneer of design over land with a history of exploitation. Can the woods be seen as an attempt to greenwash this history? Certainly, the land on which those people were exploited was not used to offer them reparation and repair, but instead to prioritise care for non-human lifeforms, that help create an image of a bucolic city while offering Parisian’s a carefree pleasure garden.

Malcolm Ferdinand, in A Decolonial Ecology, asks us to consider from whose perspective the ‘ecologically beneficial’ is imagined? He points to the devaluation of contingent, working forms of nature wrapped up in traditional knowledge or forms of transspecies cohabitation outside the Eurocentric city, in favour of the ‘pure’ nature of the uninhabited woodland or reserve. As Rosario Talevi pointed out in our discussion, in Germany you can destroy nature in urban development, as long as you replace it with ‘better’ nature. This moral hierarchy of natures, with that which is seen to be ‘free’ from the pollution of the human is valued more highly, is also critiqued by Marion Waller in her book Artefacts Naturels. ‘Defricher’ – to clear the wild and overgrown, with all its entangled human and non-human connections, to make way for the rationalised and regulated – is both one of the pillars of colonialism (as Ferdinand argues) and of the capitalist regurgitation of urban spaces. In Paris, for example, Jennifer Foster describes the ‘defrichage’ of the petite ceinture rail line, evacuating homeless migrants and subcultural meeting spaces to create a ‘better’ more ‘accessible’ kind of wild space for urban hikers and dog walkers. For Jack Halberstam, the mainstream discourse of ‘rewilding’ enables natural landscapes to be imagined as virgin spaces free of human life, and particularly of ‘unnatural’ queer bodies and trans bodies that ‘go against’ nature. This imaginary has driven colonialism’s violent suppression of what it has perceived as deviant social and sexual relations between human and non-human life – non-binary genders, shamanisms and ecological practices belonging to many indigenous societies.

Queerness can be thought of as a set of embodied mobilities: in dance, in gesture, in gathering, in shifting the body through gender spectrums, in ways of seeking intimacy and moving towards desire. Rewilding, as it is mobilised in contemporary ecology and urban planning, is more about stilling these movements than inviting them. It valorises a version of human and ecological health from the perspective of an able, cisgendered, heterosexual body, seeking forms of public activity affirmed as healthy from this same perspective: hiking, enjoying nature. Rewilding must be claimed as a cultivation of queer mobility if it is to avoid becoming a tool for further marginalisation. It must, as Halberstam argues, help create spaces in which queer people can find spiritual retreat. 

Autonomous wilds

It turned out that, after all, the city is not deep enough to sustain a forest. The flagship project at Paris’ Hotel de Ville has been quietly cancelled, citing complications with the densely-packed urban soil. We want trees for their leaves and branches but we clearly don’t think enough about their roots. The interconnected root systems of forests need more space than can be found in a subterranean urban world already colonised by human infrastructure. This raises a doubt as to whether the wilds can really be incorporated into urban life, and if not, who is excluded from the retreat could offer?

As many gay men know (these are, as Matthew Gandy suggests, mostly gay male spaces), finding the cruising ground usually takes some work. It’ll be the furthest point from the bus stop (Montrose, Marseille), or through the dense overgrowth at the edge of the park (Burgess Park, London), on the steep paths clinging to the side of the hill (Montjuic, Barcelona), or in the centre of the labyrinth (Tuileries, Paris). Out of need for safety and invisibility, cruising happens in spaces you move ‘to’ rather than ‘through’. As a result, cruising zones are ableist spaces, where idealised bodies have easiest access and gain most attention. 

Wild, untended nature, which is often the setting for cruising, raises a similar conundrum. It is often at the edges of cities, or along edges within them, on motorway verges or abandoned railway lines, or growing on abandoned plots closed off by barriers. It thrives when it is left alone, like cruising has, off-centre from the ‘beaten tracks’ of urban mobility. In this sense, cruising and the wilds are kinds of counter-public, or even anti-public, existing outdoors but incompatible with the movement of crowds that trample and disrupt. What happens when these liminal spaces within or at the edge of cities get noticed? In France, the tiers lieux (third spaces) movement is reclaiming friches (whether overgrown plots or disused buildings) as places for gathering, making, dancing. Not public in the sense of state-owned, but rendered ‘communal’ through use. In reality, though, they do not fundamentally challenge commercial models of social space, based around the sale of food and drinks, with a backdrop that looks wild but must be kept under control for the sake of commerce. The absence of cruising illustrates the difference – the aesthetic is wild but the movement is tamed.  

Gilly Tarjevsky, in a presentation for the CSM Forest School, suggested that rewilding must come with a challenge to legal and political structures governing the way spaces are made and maintained. This connection of the ecological and political suggests the need for a new language. Marion Waller points out that non-human life always possesses the capacity for autonomy, but it is not always able to practice it. Plants taken out of the ecosystems in which they can subsist become reliant on human care. Perhaps, therefore, we should be talking about autonomy rather than wildness: the possibility for things to co-exist but be self-sustaining, visible but left alone. Instead of opening overgrown plots for bars and cultural programmes, simply removing the barriers, allowing them to grow, and accepting that free parties and sexual encounters will take place there.

Elahe Karimnia, in the workshop discussion, raised a tension in this idea. We know that the infrastructures for human safety and access are often damaging to non-humans. Bright urban lighting, asphalt pathways, trimmed lawns. In my adventures in the Bois de Vincennes, I also noticed how the tangled ground of this wild space must make all sorts of assisted forms of access impossible. How do urban designers prioritise when the mobility of humans and non-humans are in conflict? In the short term, the answer is unclear. But more broadly, this problem highlights the importance of connecting struggles: when bodies of all genders, all abilities, all colours and expressions of desire are liberated through equitable applications of prosthetic technology, as Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto calls for, they can exist more wildly, with fewer of the urban infrastructures that currently mitigate for cispatriarchal violence.