Exploring rewilding as a potential design approach to improve urban biodiversity: A systematic review of the literature

Urban biodiversity continues to decline under rapid urbanization. Although biophilic design and green–blue infrastructure have strengthened nature integration into cities, planning and design practice often prioritizes human-centered service delivery and overlooks process-led recovery. Rewilding addresses this gap by foregrounding ecological autonomy, succession, and trophic complexity, yet its urban translation remains limited. This review therefore examined how rewilding could be operationalized as a design-oriented strategy in cities. An evidence-to-design roadmap was proposed to link rewilding logics, biodiversity aims, and urban planning and design, with a dual-level protocol adopted: 1) a macro-level scientometric overview of 1184 records (1990–2025) to locate urban rewilding studies within the broader literature; and 2) a micro-level PRISMA-guided synthesis of 103 spatially explicit studies coded by rewilding pathway (active/passive), targets, spatial and temporal scales, data, methods, and spatial variables. Macro mapping indicated that urban-related studies were late-emerging and weakly consolidated. Micro synthesis revealed pathway differences: passive studies primarily traced vegetation and landscape trajectories, while active studies employed suitability and connectivity modeling for intervention screening. Urban studies remained scarce (N = 9), with passive studies dominant and connectivity analyses particularly common, focusing on vegetation, birds, and planning-oriented targets. Building on these patterns, this study derived a four-level framework comprising design intent, strategic planning, tactical methodology, and operational application, translating rewilding into staged, scalable decisions aligned with urban planning and design workflows. This review positioned rewilding as a process-centered complement to conventional landscape design approaches, offering an actionable pathway for embedding biodiversity regeneration within urban systems.