When we launched our call for submissions for this themed issue of TPJ, we clearly played on the double meaning of the term “nature.” On the one hand, we meant it in its literal sense of “natural environment,” which is increasingly advocated for (and rightly so) to be infused within urban settings, while on the other hand, we meant it in a broader sense of “character,” the diversity, multiplicity and, indeed, artificiality of which has been the city’s most distinctive identity across world cultures.  

Therefore, we posed the following questions: 

… how can we continue to foster the positive values of cities while ecologically upgrading them? What are the strategies that can transform urban settlements towards “urban ecologies”? But also, how do we effect urban ecologies that can also celebrate cities’ “nature”? How can we ensure that the re-naturalization of cities will not contribute to the homogenization induced by global architecture? ¹

We believe that this issue is offering a good contribution to the ongoing reflections on these complicated issues. If the approach cannot simply be one of a widespread and uniform urban greening, lest we want to dissipate the diversity of the cities of the world under a green coat, at the same time the pressing demand to make urban living more sustainable and humane cannot be ignored. As noted by Kate Orff, “… thinking of urban ecology as an emerging hybrid category, so too can we envision and start to build new practices around community landscape. … [Thus going beyond] the inherited tropes of ‘healing’ industrial lands or ‘bringing nature into the city,’ which are too simplistic to apply to our globalized reality. This is the work of the twenty-first century.” ² 

It is also imperative that we fully grasp the multi-faceted nature of the question, if we want to attempt valid answers to current challenges. Antoine Picon, in his position paper, offers a thoughtful, conceptual framework to appreciate the various articles and essays, including the political dimension of the dialectic natural/urban. As he aptly notes: 

Far from constituting a timeless, spontaneous, or self-evident presence, nature in the city is the result of deliberate choices, technical systems, institutional arrangements, and power relations. Its introduction, management, and symbolic mobilization rely on infrastructures, imaginaries, and forms of governance that render obsolete any simple opposition between nature and technology. To understand what is at stake in the current enthusiasm for urban nature, it is therefore necessary to analyze both its technological conditions of possibility and its political implications, while situating contemporary debates within a longer historical trajectory.³

The contributors offer an articulated a varied kaleidoscope of ideas, reflections and proposals, somehow fittingly paralleling the fascinating variety of the natural environment, to start envisioning approaches, techniques, and methods of assessment to make our cities more sustainable, livable and beautiful than ever before. At this complicated junction of humankind’s history, troubled by political, social and environmental turmoil, nature is showing us once again a way forward.