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<p>Cities are increasingly confronted with intertwined challenges: biodiversity loss, climate change, and a growing disconnection between people and the natural living systems that sustain urban life. Against this backdrop, renaturation and aggradation are gaining prominence in academic and policy debates on urban greening, yet their translation into everyday professional practice remains poorly understood. Drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews with urban professionals in France and the United Kingdom, including ecologists, urban planners, architects, landscape designers, and engineers, this study examines how these concepts are interpreted, negotiated, and operationalized within professional practice. The findings reveal that renaturation is widely recognized, whereas aggradation remains unevenly understood and rarely explicitly mobilized, particularly outside soil-oriented professions. Distinct disciplinary framings emerge: ecologists and landscape architects emphasize soil regeneration, biodiversity, and long-term ecological processes, whereas architects and urban planners more often foreground legibility, predictability, and client-driven aesthetic expectations. Building on these insights, the paper identifies three interrelated tensions shaping urban practice: (1) balancing ecological autonomy and human intervention, (2) competing evaluation criteria between ecological functions, aesthetics, and use, and (3) institutional, client, and maintenance constraints that often lead to forms of “<i>performative greening</i>.” Despite these tensions, the findings reveal convergent orientations toward more adaptive, process-oriented approaches to urban nature. In this context, spontaneous urban nature emerges as a critical lens for rethinking care, shifting from control toward co-evolution, and from individual responsibility toward collective stewardship. By framing renaturation and aggradation as ecologies of repair, this study contributes to a practice-oriented understanding of how socio-ecological ethics can be enacted in urban design and planning. The paper concludes with implications for interdisciplinary collaboration, governance, and professional education to support more resilient and multispecies urban futures.</p>

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Renaturation, aggradation, and the ecologies of repair: rethinking urban nature practice in France and the United Kingdom

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年6月19日

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  • Youssef Bouery,
  • Marie Asma Ben-Othmen

摘要

Cities are increasingly confronted with intertwined challenges: biodiversity loss, climate change, and a growing disconnection between people and the natural living systems that sustain urban life. Against this backdrop, renaturation and aggradation are gaining prominence in academic and policy debates on urban greening, yet their translation into everyday professional practice remains poorly understood. Drawing on 33 semi-structured interviews with urban professionals in France and the United Kingdom, including ecologists, urban planners, architects, landscape designers, and engineers, this study examines how these concepts are interpreted, negotiated, and operationalized within professional practice. The findings reveal that renaturation is widely recognized, whereas aggradation remains unevenly understood and rarely explicitly mobilized, particularly outside soil-oriented professions. Distinct disciplinary framings emerge: ecologists and landscape architects emphasize soil regeneration, biodiversity, and long-term ecological processes, whereas architects and urban planners more often foreground legibility, predictability, and client-driven aesthetic expectations. Building on these insights, the paper identifies three interrelated tensions shaping urban practice: (1) balancing ecological autonomy and human intervention, (2) competing evaluation criteria between ecological functions, aesthetics, and use, and (3) institutional, client, and maintenance constraints that often lead to forms of “performative greening.” Despite these tensions, the findings reveal convergent orientations toward more adaptive, process-oriented approaches to urban nature. In this context, spontaneous urban nature emerges as a critical lens for rethinking care, shifting from control toward co-evolution, and from individual responsibility toward collective stewardship. By framing renaturation and aggradation as ecologies of repair, this study contributes to a practice-oriented understanding of how socio-ecological ethics can be enacted in urban design and planning. The paper concludes with implications for interdisciplinary collaboration, governance, and professional education to support more resilient and multispecies urban futures.