A future outlook for rewilding urban landscapes
In the era of ceaseless urbanization, cities are facing the loss of natural habitats and people are becoming disconnected from nature. Rewilding offers a compelling vision for rethinking and retraining the functions of urban greenspaces in order to offset urban environmental impacts and to strengthen nature—human relationships. A rewilding and greening model can reinstate heterogeneity and support urban biodiversity. Less intervention also saves energy and increases natural and human resource management efficiency. Rewilding provides multiple ecosystem services, and, despite certain hurdles that must be tackled before wider integration into our cityscapes, offers great benefits. The spatial and temporal dynamics of the rewilded landscape have the potential to add values and functions at multiple scales over time. Different types of managed (roadside greenery, urban parks, other private and public greenspaces, green roofs) and unmanaged (secondary forest, scrublands) urban greenspaces have been rewilded. Rewilded areas can play a significant socio-ecological role in compact cities like Singapore. The overall concept of urban diversification has been continuously supported by scientific research and in practice has had both large and small successes. Nonetheless, outcomes remain at a stage of requiring further investigation, additional negotiation with different stakeholders and listening to the ideas of all stakeholders to tackle the challenge of developing truly socio-ecologically resilient cities. The development of systemic frameworks by transdisciplinary teams would make substantial headway for the successful continuation of urban rewilding.
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