Dissolving the urban/rural divide: Why inserting nature into cities isn't enough for a sustainable future

Transforming the world's cities to the extent needed to effectively obviate the damage caused by large-scale urbanization is not solely a question of rethinking how we build them, but also of how we conceptualize them in the first place, and specifically how we think about the relationship between cities and nature. Meaningfully integrating nature into the urban landscape requires us to understand the city not as a bounded, self-contained spatial form, but as a porous and relational ecological system in a broader relationship with its environment. Recognizing the city as such enables urbanism to move from separation and enclosure toward reciprocity and embeddedness.