Urban rewilding in practice

What does rewilding look like in the city, where dunes meet tramlines or goats graze among abandoned factories? This essay traces rewilding as lived practice across multiple geographies: the shifting dunes and forest margins of Sopot, Poland; contested landscapes of the Visegrad cities; improvised gardens along the Uzh River in wartime Ukraine; fieldwalks with students in Pittsburgh; and everyday cracks in the streets and ruins of southern Italy’s Gargano region. Rather than a single ecological project, rewilding, as presented here, appears as a mosaic of encounters – planned and spontaneous, hopeful and contested – through which human and nonhuman lives continually reconfigure urban space. By following foxes, swans, weeds, and goats, the piece reflects on how rewilding unsettles civic order, opens imaginative possibilities, and reframes cultural geography as an active practice of coexistence.