In 2021, billionaire entrepreneur Marc Lore, outgoing president and CEO of Walmart eCommerce U.S., announced plans for an audacious new project: to build 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?
This dualistic thinking, rooted in a Cartesian logic that separates culture from nature and human from nonhuman, continues to inform urban planning, governance and design – including some current efforts to integrate nature into urban environments, for example through green infrastructure and biophilic design, which often remain constrained by a mindset that treats the city as a domain fundamentally distinct from the natural world.
Even the urban visions coming out of the “biophilic architecture” movement – their futuristic renderings of pristine urban utopias overflowing with greenery – are not immune to this problem (in fact, some are among the most vivid examples of it). Visually striking though many of them are, despite appearances they often still unconsciously retain this ingrained notion of nature as an external element to be inserted into an otherwise self-contained urban landscape, disconnected from its surrounding ecosystems, and often in ways that often rely on super-hi-tech, energy- and water-intensive systems to keep it alive.
A particularly graphic example, both in its symbolism and its real-world impact, is the LINE, in Saudi Arabia – one of several utopian megacity projects to have emerged recently with ambitions of creating a futuristic sustainable model of urban living. The LINE is literally a giant, 500-meter-high, 110-mile-long glass wall bisecting a desert, with zero regard for the ecosystems it severs, its interiors sealed off from the outside world and festooned with lush greenery that has no business in a desert.
Critics of the project point out that this massive structure would create a large-scale barrier to adjacent ecosystems and migratory species similar to that created by highways, and the mirrored exterior would be a deathtrap for birds. And that’s not to mention the project’s gargantuan carbon footprint – approximately 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, by one estimate – because, as architecture professor Philip Oldfield points out, “you cannot build a 500-meter-tall […] building out of low-carbon materials.”
The LINE
The LINE is an extreme example, but the point it illustrates still stands. As long as nature is conceived as an external element to be inserted into an urban order otherwise separated from its surroundings, such initiatives, however well-intentioned, risk becoming superficial, aestheticized, tokenistic, or even counterproductive, inadvertently reinforcing the very logic they seek to subvert: that nature is something external to be invited in, managed, beautified and subordinated. In short, they preserve the appearance of connection while concealing the reality of separation.
Meaningfully integrating nature and sustainable planning into our cities requires us to understand the urban world 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 enclosure toward reciprocity and embeddedness. In simple terms, breaking down the urban-rural divide.
Such a transformation will require more than zoning policy reform and green roofs (necessary though those things are); it calls for a new epistemology of the city that situates urban life within ecological continuities rather than against or separate from them. This means planning and governance models that seek to restore ecological cycles and processes (hydrological flows, species migration etc.), for example, and allow for spontaneous development (resident-led initiatives, such as de-paving) to become part of the fabric of urban identity, rather than simply inserting discrete green elements into an otherwise fixed and spatially bounded urban form.
In counterpoint to the LINE and its ilk, we might look to various projects in Europe for examples of how ecological design can dissolve the urban-rural divide in this way.
A masterplan for the neighborhood of Fælledby on the outskirts of Copenhagen, for example, proposed transforming a 45-acre former dumping ground into a model for sustainable living that aims to blur the interface between the city and the surrounding natural systems.
Designed by architecture firm Henning Larsen for Copenhagen Municipality in collaboration with biologists and environmental engineers from consulting company MOE, this neighborhood – or rather, three connected neighborhoods – would be built entirely of wood and include 40% undeveloped habitat for local flora and fauna. Its three mini-villages are connected by green corridors with native plants, ensuring free movement for wildlife. The facades of its buildings contain birdhouses and animal habitats. Ponds and wetlands provide habitat for aquatic life, and community gardens with native plants attract butterflies and other pollinators.
As the team behind the Fælledby plan explains, the neighborhood “merges traditional Danish urban and rural typologies to create a hybrid that balances the city and its natural surroundings.” Says Mateusz Mastalski, Head of Urbanism at Henning Larsen: “With the rural village as an archetype, we’re creating a city where biodiversity and active recreation define a sustainable pact between people and nature.”
Fælledby
Fælledby is a particularly interesting example because of its location. In many cities – and certainly most American cities – the urban core is separated from its surrounding countryside by a band of suburban sprawl. This area could, in theory, provide opportunities for ecological connectivity between a city and its surroundings, but in practice it more often does the exact opposite. The nature that does exist amid the impervious surfaces of suburbia (lawns, private gardens, golf courses…) mostly tends to be manicured, “artificialized” and soaked in pesticides and fertilizer, creating a kind of ecological “dead zone” that becomes a barrier to connectivity between city and country rather than a conduit for it. Fælledby, on the other hand, suggests how a residential area on the urban periphery can house thousands of residents and provide all the amenities of modern life while at the same time blurring the interface between town and country in such a way as enable ecological connections between the city and its environs that suburbia usually tends to sever.
Urbanization on the scale predicted by the UN presents major challenges. But it also offers tremendous opportunities. With smart policy, there is no reason why the cities of the 21st century can’t be hubs of sustainability and ecological regeneration rather than depletion. But this requires reimagining urbanity itself: not as the opposite of nature, but as a form of it: a living, evolving system in constant interplay with the more-than-human world.
