Planning Wild Cities

“Planning Wild Cities” is a thoughtful and stylish book by Wendy Steele. Interlaced with her analyses are potent references to contemporary music. Beautiful photographs by her son and partner illustrate this book. Particularly compelling is a “bushfire” painting by Melanie Nightingale. In the introduction, Steele pens a powerful personal story about how she and her partner escaped a terrifying bushfire during the Black Summer of 2020. She claims they had “nowhere to go” and cries, “But where to now?” This introduction is powerful, relevant, experiential, heartfelt, passionate, engaged, and embodied. Steele tells us: “We are beginning to understand that in the context of anthropogenic or human-induced climate change, it is ‘we’ who are on fire”. She identifies the critical value of engagement as she sadly points out: “Little in Australia’s engagement with climate change has changed”. Steele systematically guides us through the weaknesses of the modernist planning project. Her current references are most valuable to the researcher. She thoroughly analyzes the causes and manifestations of Australia’s climate emergency (an area in which she is clearly an expert). She enumerates the multiple ways that planning fails Nature. While valuable, this analysis is not new or about “wildness”. Planning academics have been painfully slow to catch on, while environmental ethicists and Nature writers have been across these issues for decades. Nevertheless, Steels convincingly summarises the well-documented failures of urban planning concerning Nature. Her discussion of “borders” in Chapter 2 conjures compelling images of new ways of conceptualising living at the margins and “the borderlands”. However, Steele buries the notion of “wildness” in familiar analyses of planning’s many well-documented failures. Chapter 4, a discussion of the planning of South Australia’s 1950s new town, Elizabeth, raises the question: “what’s this got to do with wildness?” Government planners sacrificed outer suburban farmland to create this model of the British New Town to house families of immigrants working in a car factory. Direct experience of Elizabeth over many decades suggests that whatever is currently amiss in Elizabeth probably has little to do with wildness. Steele then reminds us: “For we are the wild city. The present’s bleeding heart. How to speak of its aliveness?” Sadly, she fails to address the bigger question: “How to listen to its wildness?” Indeed, that activity must precede speaking of (or for) it in planning contexts. Steele claims, “We are situated in damaged and wounded country”. Her problematic solution for planners of wild cities is stewardship. We should try to avoid this deeply anthropocentric concept in writing about planning. It originated in traditions long central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (Not to mention colonialism.) This discussion prompts me to ask, how can we possibly respect “the wild” if we continue to affirm that humans are the peak of the evolutionary pyramid, “managing” and having dominion over other-than-human Nature? Steele concludes Chapter 5 with a call for caring: “If we are the wild city, then care for each other and Country is the key”. This revelation is Steele’s perfect opportunity to delve into the rich terrain of the feminist ethic of caring (and caring for Nature). She claims: “An ethic of care has surfaced as a rallying point for collective action in the Anthropocene”. Then comes her cri de coeur: