Dear green place

Part of the escapist appeal of communal growing spaces such as community gardens and urban meadows lies in the sense of different ways of living the city. They offer what the poet Colin Herd, in a poem for a green space map from 2021, might call ‘places in a place’. Urban growing spaces open up a reconnection with natural rhythms and a disconnection from putatively urban pressures of time and space. This is read within a narrative of Glasgow as the ‘Dear Green Place’, a naming which sits strangely against its industrial (and post-industrial) history and its colonial heritage as an important city in the British Empire. Yet the number of parks, river fronts and increasingly long-term stalled spaces reclaimed by nature (like the Cuningar Loop in the East End, or the former Claypitts site in north Glasgow) reinstate a connection between a supposedly natural history and a human one. Glasgow's 425 hectares of derelict and vacant land in 2018, the largest urban concentration in Scotland, offers an interesting view onto this, often reclaimed first by buddleia and other invasive plants, and eventually, if left to it, renaturalized.

In Glasgow, proximity to wild places can be as simple as proximity to abandoned space, which is abundant, especially in poorer areas of the city. The future of such spaces seems to be mixed – with enthusiasm from the Scottish Government for turning such spaces to economic and housing uses balanced against recognition that some spaces are better suited (in the short to medium term) as green spaces and indeed wild spaces (Glasgow City Council, 2019). In the right conditions (environmental, cultural, economic and policy), a place of rubble can become an urban wilderness, with potential to address a range of social issues, not least a limited access for some to urban green space – which can be an acute issue especially in working-class areas of Glasgow. Such a wilderness is a construction, something Jorgensen (2011, p 2) notes when she says that wilderness ‘can be seen as an idea, a way of thinking about urban space’ that centres the agency of the natural world over the human.