Urban Wilds

Urban Wilds is a seminar series that explores the ecological evolution of cities, focusing on wilderness as an ecological attribute that expresses freedom and possibility in urban spaces. The series examines how cities function as ecologically dynamic and fertile terrain that produces novel assemblages.

Cities are largely spaces of control and repression, but they are also replete with ecologically empancipatory possibilities. Urban wilds are conceived in this seminar series as spaces where the constraints of contemporary urban socio-political life are attenuated, where people and living things can exist and evolve beyond the binds of capitalism, heteronormativity, classism, racism, xenophobia and gendered repression.

The Urban Wilds series takes a relational approach to ecology, valuing the relationships between and among life forms rather than fixed understandings of what is desirable and appropriate or how ecological systems function. Relationships that challenge or subvert oppressive and exclusionary understandings of ecology are foregrounded as ecological alternatives to the urban mainstream.

The Urban Wilds series is coordinated by Prof. Jennifer Foster of the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC) at York University, in Toronto.

Sessions will be hosted on zoom, with advanced registration.