Inhabiting more-than-human ecologies of Extended urbanization: Unruly leopards amidst urban-wild enmeshment in the Northern Aravalli region

Abstract

As urbanization attains an increasingly planetary reach, transforming agrarian landscapes and commons beyond the city-countryside divide, ‘rewilding’ is gaining increasing popularity as a protective countermovement. This countermovement, comprising of a patchwork of actors, including state-led agencies, philanthropic and citizen-led groups, as well as environmental lawyers, seeks to counter unregulated urbanization and mitigate its impacts by restoring biodiversity and ecological processes in areas designated as “wilderness” or “pristine nature.” However, these legally and culturally constructed boundaries between urban and wilderness frequently diminish and collapse as species like leopards, wolves, and cougars transgress and repurpose these spaces. This paper investigates the enmeshment of urban and wilderness through human-animal interactions, examining how the more-than-human ecology of extended urbanization is produced and inhabited. It explores the different strategies and modalities of rewilding that generate a mosaic of “wilderness” spaces, such as biodiversity parks, urban forests, safari reserves, abandoned quarries, waterfronts, and green corridors, amidst the extended urbanization of nature. The paper also examines the governance of these spaces, focusing on how legal and property boundaries are upheld and how these efforts are captured for further capital accumulation. While grounded in empirical research from the Northern Aravalli Region in India, this paper provides comparative insights into the global challenges of urban-wild enmeshment and the complexities of planning for coexistence in the era of planetary urbanization.