Rewilding education? Exploring an imagined and experienced outdoor learning space

ABSTRACT

This paper follows the progress of a small rural primary school in the UK as it goes about cultivating a new vision of the future by transforming its outdoor spaces. Exploring the significance of these outdoor spaces as they are imagined, made and experienced, from the first design stages to the first days of use, the paper considers how feelings about children’s access to and engagement with nature are entangled with cultures of protection and surveillance. Using observations from a multimodal ethnography, including video tours and photography workshops alongside observant participation and interviews, the paper illustrates how, in practical terms, changing an educational landscape can also shift a school culture, giving children greater freedom outdoors to live, learn and grow together.     

‘A NEW SEASON FOR PLANNING’: URBAN GARDENING AS INFORMAL PLANNING IN ROME

This article investigates the relationship between urban gardening and planning by building upon the results of field research on gardening initiatives in the city of Rome, Italy. The work is aimed at suggesting that, while often associated in geography and planning literature with urban informality practices (e.g. accidental city or self‐made urbanism), urban gardening actually presents the character of a distinctive form of people's interaction with urban space, here defined as “informal planning”. This includes practices that are intentionally put forward by local dwellers with the intention of urban space planning and organizing public life in the absence of legal definition, guidance and funds provided by public authorities or the private sector. Urban gardening cases in Rome exemplify the emergence of informal planning and show how, by questioning the counterplanning tradition that understands urban gardening as an antagonist spatial practice opposing institutional planning, informal planning can open up collaborative possibilities. A new mode of interaction between citizens' agency and the formal planning initiatives of local administration can lead to creative solutions to address some of the problems associated with the neoliberal transformation of the city space, most notably the decrease in public space and its deterioration.