Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide

In 2021, billionaire entrepreneur Marc Lore, outgoing president and CEO of Walmart eCommerce U.S., announced plans for an audacious new venture: building a city. From scratch. In a desert. This city – named “Telosa” – would be “the most inclusive and environmentally sustainable city on the planet.” Powered by renewable energy and built around the “15-minute city” model, with no gas-powered vehicles allowed and an emphasis on walkability and public transportation, Telosa promised a futuristic urban utopia that would welcome its first 50,000 residents in 2030 and ultimately grow to a target population of around 5 million by mid-century. (As of 2025, it seems that no location for the project has yet been agreed upon.)

Telosa is one of several similar visions for 21st century urban utopias that have made the headlines over recent years, and it exemplifies an oversight common to many of them: a failure to properly consider the ecological continuity between the city and its surroundings. In Lore’s case, the decision to site a massive metropolis in the middle of a fragile desert ecosystem – however efficient its water use or green its energy – raises serious questions about the relationship between a city and the broader landscapes it displaces or interrupts.

These questions are no longer academic. More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and that figure is expected to rise dramatically over the next two decades. The United Nations forecasts that the global urban population will increase by approximately 2.5 billion people by 2050, reaching a total of 6.7 billion people – around 70% of the world’s population. By 2030, the number of “megacities” – cities with more than 10 million inhabitants – will have increased from 31 to 43, and roughly 1.2 million square kilometers of new urban land will have been created. That’s approximately equivalent to the surface area of South Africa.

These are huge numbers, and without a serious rethink of how we design these fast-expanding metropolises they will come at a devastating cost. Cities currently occupy only about 2-3% of the Earth’s land area but are responsible for a massively outsized share of environmental degradation. They account for more than 75% of all natural resource consumption, produce around 70% of the world’s CO2 emissions and generate 50% of all global waste, not to mention swallowing up wildlife habitat, harming biodiversity and ecosystems both locally and globally.

In this context, integrating nature into the urban landscape on a large scale becomes a vital policy imperative. Urban forests, wetlands, green roofs, “nature-based infrastructure” and other natural features will be vital to protect biodiversity, improve air and water quality and bring down the temperatures in urban areas, reducing the ecological footprint of urban expansion while at the same time ensuring that cities are able to withstand the impacts of climate change and remain livable places for their growing populations.

Transforming the world’s cities to the extent needed to offset the impacts of urbanization on the scale the UN predicts, however, doesn’t just require us to rethink how we build them, but also how we conceptualize them in the first place, and specifically how we think about the relationship between cities and nature: How should this relationship be imagined? What logics of space and governance should guide the ways nature exists within the urban fabric? What even is a city?

The Folly of the New Towns

By LDV Urban Studio 
French original here.

In recent years, ambitious visions of “new cities” have proliferated across the globe—futuristic urban experiments promising to reconcile innovation, sustainability, and human flourishing. From the high deserts of the American Southwest to the arid plateaus of the Arabian Peninsula, these projects are marketed as the bold blueprints of tomorrow’s world: climate-responsive, technologically sophisticated, and socially equitable.

Despite their rhetorical appeal and visionary aesthetics, such projects often raise more questions than answers. What lies beneath the allure of these so-called “smart cities”? Who funds them, and to what end? Do they represent genuine models for future urbanism—or are they monuments to excess, destined to fade into obsolescence like so many failed utopias before them?

The biophilia hypothesis revisited

The term 'biophilia' has become something of a buzzword in the fields of sustainability, design, architecture, real estate and elsewhere over recent years. Its manifestations in some of these conversations often have a strong whiff of faddishness about them, but the concept itself is crucial in developing a holistic understanding of the importance of nature for human wellbeing.

 

Derived from the Greek words bios (life) and philia (love or affinity), biophilia describes an innate, subconscious human inclination to seek connections with the rest of nature. First introduced by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in the mid-twentieth century, the concept gained traction within the scientific community in the 1980s through the work of biologist Edward O. Wilson, whose 1984 book Biophilia framed this affinity as a product of evolutionary development.

Wilson argued that the human species evolved in close contact with natural environments, and this prolonged coevolution has produced an innate emotional and cognitive bond with the living world. In other words, our brains and bodies are biologically predisposed to respond positively to natural stimuli. This hypothesis has since been supported by empirical research in a range of disciplines, from psychology and neuroscience to urban planning and environmental health, demonstrating the measurable benefits of nature exposure for human wellbeing.

Green infrastructure for pollinators

Pollinators – bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, ants, bats, hummingbirds and others – are a vital component of the planet’s ecosystems. Almost 90% of all flowering plants and more than a third of the world’s crop species depend on them. Countless species of birds and mammals feed on fruits and seeds that couldn’t exist without them. With pollinator populations in steep decline, it is becoming ever more crucial to ensure that these imperiled creatures have safe havens in which to thrive.

Through the smart use of so-called “green infrastructure,” the same urban landscapes that are eating up wildlife habitats also present opportunities to create those havens. From street trees to green stormwater infrastructure like the bioswales and rain gardens now used in many cities to manage stormwater runoff and mitigate flooding, much of this infrastructure can double as wildlife habitat, and some can be particularly beneficial to pollinators.

How (and why) to depave a city

The surge in urbanization across the world over the last century has seen countless millions of square miles of natural land paved over with concrete, asphalt and other impermeable materials – and it’s causing immense damage.

From increasing flood risk and preventing the natural filtration of pollutants - thus impacting water quality and damaging aquatic habitats and ecosystems - to exacerbating the “urban heat island effect” and the myriad health impacts that come with it, what began as a way of meeting the needs of the 20th century has become an obstacle to addressing the challenges of the 21st, threatening cities’ ability to remain livable places capable of withstanding the effects of a changing climate.

A close look at pretty much any urban area will reveal plenty of impervious surface that simply doesn’t need to be there – from tiny patches of ground like redundant pieces of sidewalk and abandoned lots, through to schoolyards, nurseries, parking lots, public squares, extra lanes on roads that are never used, parking spots on streets where no one ever parks, and so on. And it’s not just public spaces. How many of us have paved yards? And why? Do they really need to be paved?