Urban wilderness refers to informal green spaces within urban areas that distant enough from urbanized areas so that human activities cannot be registered.[1] Urban wilderness areas within cities have been shown to beneficially impact the public's perception of wilderness and nature, making this an important element to future city planning[2]
Key traits of urban wilderness that differentiate it from other urban green spaces:
Various urban wilderness areas have been established throughout the world. Examples include the Knoxville Urban Wilderness in Knoxville, TN,[1] Purgatory Creek Natural Area in San Marcos, TX,[3] the Danube-Auen National Park in Vienna and Lower Austria,[2] the Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area in Tulsa, and the Milwaukee River Greenway in Milwaukee, WI.[4]
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the urbanization of cities. Jacob Riis and other reformers fought for parks in urban areas.[5]
While many societies had traditions of intense urban plantings, such as the rooftops of pre-conquistador Mexico City, these traditions did not reemerge on a larger scale in the industrialized world until the creation of naturalistic urban parks, such as the ones by Calvert Vaux[6] and Frederick Law Olmsted.[7]
More recently, groups such as squatters and Reclaim The Streets have performed guerrilla plantings, worked in and on abandoned buildings, and torn holes in highway asphalt to fill with soil and flowers.[8] These actions have been effective in creating new planted zones in economically stagnant areas like urban Eastern Germany, where abandoned buildings have been reverted to forest-like conditions.[9]