INTRODUCTION
Lead Editor:
Stephanie Wakefield, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and International Corresponding Editor, Urban Studies
Wild Cities, Urban Rewilding, and Urban Vitalism forms part of the Critical and Conceptual Advances in Urban Studies Call for Papers initiative launched by Urban Studies. This initiative aspires to catalyze groundbreaking research and thought-provoking discussions that will shape the future of urban studies and contribute to new understandings of cities across the globe.
As a key part of this initiative, this call for Wild Cities, Urban Rewilding, and Urban Vitalism aims to push beyond current ‘urban nature’ and ‘rewilding’ discourses toward more experimental, vitalist, and theoretically ambitious engagements with wildness, domestication, and ferality in urban life. We seek contributions that critically explore not only the reintroduction of non-human species into urban environments, but the broader questions of human wildness, urban eros, subjective intensity, natality, and the charged tensions that make cities generative or sterile.
Wild Cities and Urban Rewilding
Contemporary urban thought faces a paradox. On one hand, ‘rewilding’ and ‘urban nature’ have become prominent themes in planning, design, and environmental management—typically framed as the reintroduction of native species, the creation of wildlife corridors, and the promotion of biodiversity and green infrastructure in built environments. On the other hand, the city itself is undergoing a deeper mutation: increasingly cybernetic, mediated by platforms and predictive systems, marked by declining fertility and attenuated sociality. The contemporary city is being rewilded at the level of species reintroduction while becoming ever more domesticated at the level of human experience.
This call invites scholars to move beyond conventional framings of urban rewilding –beyond the introduction of green infrastructure and keystone species— toward a more expansive and experimental problematic. What does it mean for a city to be wild? What are the conditions under which urban environments produce intensity, encounter, eros, and fertility, or fail to do so? How might we conceptualize the relationship between domestication and wildness not only for plants and animals, but for humans as well as the built environment itself?
Aristotle famously argued that the city comes into being ‘by nature’ (phusis), unfolding ‘in the same way an adult human being comes to be from embryo, neonate and child.’ The city, on this view, is not merely a technical artifact but an arena in which human nature plays itself out, is formed, concentrated, and intensified. The polis is ‘prior by nature’ to the individual because outside it, one is ‘either a beast or a god.’ This perspective—the city as developmental form, as a site where forces are metabolized and human potentials are selected and shaped— offers a radically different starting point than contemporary urban ecology or nature-based design.
Drawing on this lineage, and contributing to more recent work in urban theory, critical geography, and speculative philosophy, this call invites papers that treat the city as a field of forces rather than a container of units; that examine wildness and domestication as dynamic poles in permanent tension; and that explore the conditions under which cities produce vitality, desire, and new forms of life, or foreclose them.
The geographer Jamie Lorimer has argued that rewilding does not actually restore ecosystems to prior states but produces new configurations and mutations — ‘wild experiments’ conducted in contemporary urbanized environments. The forms of life that emerge will not resemble a Holocene blueprint. The Florida panther, often invoked as an exemplar of rewilding, is itself a genetic hybrid created through the deliberate introduction of Texas pumas. This ‘rewilded’ panther must now adapt to a radically altered South Florida landscape, navigating roads, residential zones, and agricultural lands. Conservationists build corridors and underpasses—arguably domesticating the panther while its increased presence potentially rewilds the human city. Just as equally, historically cultural avant-gardes have played a similar function, emerging at moments when urban life is alienated or overdetermined, to reopen and revolatilize the city.
This call extends such thinking to the human. If rewilding produces not restoration but mutation, what would it mean to rewild not only the urban environment but urban life itself? What kinds of spatial interventions, design practices, or conceptual reframings might restore the charged tension between wildness and order that once made cities productive of new forms of existence?
We invite papers that offer novel and disruptive thinking about the interplay between wildness, domestication, and ferality in urban environments, engaging not only with plants and animals but with human subjectivity, desire, encounter, and the generative conditions of urban life. Contributions from across disciplines are welcome, as are papers drawing on diverse urban settings from cities around the world.
We invite proposals that align with the purposes of this call in various ways, including but not limited to the following topics and themes:
We invite contributions that develop new theoretical frameworks for understanding wildness in the city beyond the conventional vocabularies of urban ecology, green infrastructure, and biophilic design. How might we draw on vitalist philosophy, psychoanalysis, affect theory, or speculative thought (or art, film, music, or fitness) to reconceptualize urban wildness? What can older traditions —Greek phusis, Aristotelian naturalism, Nietzschean or Bergonsian vitalism— contribute to rewilding contemporary urban theory itself? We welcome papers that challenge the domestication of ‘rewilding’ discourse and urban thought itself.
The Greeks understood the city as an erotically charged space. Pericles called on Athenians to become erastai of the polis, to fall in love with their city. The capacity to fall in love with a city or in a city, to feel its potential and be drawn into it, is not separate from the capacity to fall in love at all. Today statistics indicate that young urban residents socialize less, have fewer monogamous relationships, and fewer children. We invite papers that explore the relationship between urban form, eros, and fertility; that examine how spatial environments condition desire, encounter, and reproduction; and that investigate the decline of urban vitality and its demographic consequences.
Especially post-pandemic, the cyberneticization of urban life threatens to eliminate urban conviviality and mystery, and to transform cities into smoothly administered, predictive, feedback-saturated environments. We invite papers that examine processes of subjective domestication in contemporary urban environments; the role of platforms, interfaces, and AI in reshaping urban experience; and the conditions under which intensity and event are reactivated.
Ecological rewilding often centers on keystone species whose reintroduction triggers trophic cascades and ecosystem transformation. We invite papers that treat avant-gardes —artistic, architectural, political, technological— as analogous forces in urban ecosystems. The Surrealists, Situationists, architectural avant gardes like Archigram — each responded to a certain closure in urbanism by developing new, context-specific tactics to reactivate suppressed forces of urban life. We invite papers that examine historical or contemporary avant-gardes as agents of urban rewilding; that theorize the ‘immune function’ of experimental practice in domesticated environments; or that explore the conditions under which new avant-gardes emerge.
We invite papers that expand the concept of rewilding beyond its conventional environmental management definition. How might rewilding apply to social practices, built form, governance structures, or subjective orientations? What would it mean to rewild zoning, regulation, or urban planning, as much as urban studies and thought itself? What design or spatial interventions might produce ‘wild experiments’ at the level of human life? We welcome speculative and propositional papers alongside empirical case studies.
The rewilded Florida panther —a genetic hybrid adapting to an entirely urbanized landscape— exemplifies the complex entanglements produced by contemporary rewilding efforts. We invite papers that examine human-animal relations in urban environments; the production of hybrid species and hybrid urbanisms; the ways in which non-human presence rewilds human urban life; and the governance challenges and political conflicts that accompany wildlife reintroduction in densely inhabited areas.
Contemporary new city projects —from California Forever to Starbase to NEOM— represent attempts to found new urban forms outside the inherited constraints of existing cities. We invite papers that examine these frontier projects as experiments in urban wildness or domestication; that analyze the conceptual and methodological formations of new city-building. How do these projects relate to questions of rewilding or overdomestication?
We invite papers that situate questions of urban wildness within broader debates about nature, the Anthropocene, and planetary urbanization. How does the nature/culture or wild/domestic binary operate in contemporary urban thought? What alternative theoretical approaches or concepts might inform a different thinking of urban nature?
We invite contributions that develop or demonstrate innovative methods for studying wildness, vitality, and domestication in urban environments. This might include psychogeographic practices, sensory ethnographies, speculative design methods, or quantitative approaches to measuring urban vitality. We welcome methodological reflections that address the challenges of studying phenomena that circumvent conventional social scientific capture.
Authors interested in contributing to this theme should submit an abstract for prioritised assessment. Those whose abstracts have been pre-approved will then be invited to submit a full paper.
We strongly encourage authors to submit abstracts and papers before the suggested deadlines. We will process abstracts as and when received, and abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editor after the deadline. The invited full manuscript submissions will be prioritised during the internal screening and external review processes at the Journal to facilitate rapid response. In addition, unlike standard special issues that are published as a group when they are ready, the Journal is committed to the timely publication of the accepted papers under this call. The Journal will curate the accepted papers as an online collection and publish them individually as and when they are ready.
Abstract Submission for Prioritised Assessment
Researchers interested in contributing to this theme must submit an abstract of 500 words outlining their research by 26 April 2026 or earlier to our Editorial Office.
- Abstracts will be reviewed after the deadline, and those selected for advancement to a full manuscript invitation will be informed by 26 May 2026 or earlier.
- If invited, the submission of the full manuscript will be due 26 January 2027 or earlier. All invited manuscripts will be peer-reviewed following the standard USJ guidelines.
Full-Length Paper Submission
If your abstract has been pre-approved and you have received an invitation to submit the full manuscript:
- Submit your full-length paper by 26 January 2027 to Urban Studies via the ScholarOne portal.
- Your paper must be formatted according to our guidance here.
- Ensure your cover letter states that the submission is in response to the Wild Cities, Urban Rewilding, and Urban Vitalism call for papers.
- Tick the Special Issue category in both Step 1 and Step 5 on the ScholarOne submission form.
The standard peer-review process of the Journal will apply, including pre-screening by a theme lead. If the paper passes pre-screening, it will undergo review by external reviewers in the normal way.
