What lessons can remaking urban natures provide to ecologists and natural resource managers? I examine how the process of cultivating plants in the United States has grown more complex as the attitudes, values, and beliefs of society have shifted towards biophilia. I am especially interested how urbanites have increasingly blended alternative cultivation practices to create more biodiverse landscapes in private spaces of yards and in the public spaces of neighborhoods. Their remaking efforts have helped to diversify the meaning of urban nature through their everyday practices that remove lawn and replace with it with more biodiverse landscapes. The conventional aesthetic of immaculate lawns, shade trees, and bold flowers has given way to a more complex, multifunctional, multicultural mosaic of diverse plant species and landscapes, which I define as different types of urban natures. The result is the hybridization of private and public spaces towards more biodiverse landscapes that represent a shift in cultural norms towards greater acceptance of alternative interpretations of human-plant-habitat relations. Yet, a key gap exists in the literature that takes a critical look at this cross-scale cultural phenomenon as a remaking of the definition of urban nature to one emphasizing the pluralistic visions of urban natures.
Results/Conclusions
To address this key gap in the literature, I will draw on my extensive experience to propose a framework that will help ecologists and natural resource managers to better “read” the complex cultural, ecological, and political meanings of urban landscapes with yards and neighborhood as the remaking of urban natures. This framework draws on cutting-edge academic research and professional practice to develop a series of lessons to help advance understanding about these new urban natures and to explain why they are emerging more frequently in American yards and neighborhoods. Building on these lessons, more biodiverse yards and neighborhoods have become a key touchstone to explore the interconnections among urban natures, plant biodiversity, conservation ethics, and aesthetics—especially about the pluralistic perspectives, values, and visions of the biodiverse city. In addition, yards and neighborhoods are a “hothouse” for emerging ideas that redefine the understanding of human-plant-habitat relationships in urbanized societies like the United States. Of particular importance is the emergence of a multifunctional, multicultural landscape aesthetic that is produced by personal encounters with plant biodiversity through the everyday practices of cultivating plants in yards and neighborhoods.