Wildness, Justice, and Aesthetics

This book analyzes the intrinsic value of urban environments in a world where the boundary between the city and the wild is increasingly dissolving. It provides the analytical tools for regarding the city as simultaneously a wild and a civil space. Due to rapid urbanization, the city is becoming the dominant habitat for people while also engulfing non-human habitats. Animals and plants are finding new ways to adapt to the built environment of urban spaces. But what does it mean to regard the city as simultaneously a wild and civil space? This book focuses on what it means to define the ideal city as the opposite of the wild, as well as how to include the wild in the sphere of the political. The author builds on the Aristotelian notion of the city as a political form of life in which the pleasant and the just are negotiated. Ideal wild cities incorporate the disruptive agency of non-humans and afford explicit and implicit deliberations on common values and ideals such as aesthetics, health, biophilia, leisure, community, wildness, order, sustainability, and (bio-) diversity. Wildness, Justice, and Aesthetics in Imaginaries of Future Urban Natures will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in environmental philosophy and environmental humanities, political philosophy, environmental ethics and aesthetics, philosophy of the city, urban ecology, and animal ethics.