"New Wilderness": risk or chanche for contemporary cities?

In recent years the concept of spontaneous, wild nature has been inspiring renewed interest and rising social consideration. In the context of safeguarding natural assets, enhancing the value of wilderness is now a leading idea, in which it embodies the symbolic role that was once attributed to preindustrial cultural landscapes. In nations like Germany, always to the forefront in movements for safeguarding nature and environmental planning, the need to foster the dynamic processes of nature (safeguarding of processes) rather than just aiming at a static conservation of natural assets in their current state, has also been acknowledged at the administrative level. In the ambit of landscape planning, too, there is a widepread tendency nowadays to plan green spaces that can guarantee authentic “naturalist experiences”. The meaning of nature, therefore, is changing, together with the way it is perceived and attributed a symbolic value in the view of life. in the same way as some landscape gardeners of the French school have long demonstrated in the context of periurban agricultural spaces. Not only natural environments but also representations of its processes are now contemplated in landscape planning projects that are critically different from the previous banal “greening” projects. The present work proposes to extend the meaning of wilderness, searching for some analogies in current urban restoration processes. Can urban planning find support of its actions in a redefinition of the terms decline and regeneration? To what extent can the concept of wilderness become a project for communication and material for planning? This work aims to extend the meaning of wilderness, contrasted with the proliferation of artificiality that landscape design is proposing in the city, and to search for new significance of urban nature that can help to build an urban nature immersed in our present-day culture.