Definitions

Urban rewilding strategies focus on movement corridors. In an urban context, such corridors are swaths of habitat allowing animals to move from one part of the city to another. In cities, movement between habitat islands within a hostile landscape is central to wildlife flourishing. Rewilding projects that increase the rate of species immigration can also increase the number of species occupying a habitat island. A system or network of such islands or patches creates a “stepping-stone wildlife refuge” that increases the ability of individuals to move between habitat patches, lowering recolonization time of a patch that has experienced local extirpation. 

Along with this, corridor definitions have evolved from focusing on passage, to including both habitat and passage. Habitat promotes survivorship and reproduction, while movement allows wildlife expanded options for habitat resources. Movement corridors can offer a variety of habitat configurations. They may include appropriate resource for survival, persistence, and reproduction, including food, water, and shelter. Urban corridors can act as conduits to offer ways for animals to move through from one place to another, providing additional resources for survival. Corridors may act as habitats especially for corridor dwellers — species with smaller scales of movement, necessitating multi-generational movement to pass through a corridor. 

Structurally, this creates what ecologists term a “matrix-patch-corridor.” In landscape ecology, a matrix is the most extensive and connected landscape type; the features that differ from the matrix include a patch, which is a non-linear area of alternate types of land uses, and a corridor which is a linear feature that connects the patches to the landscape matrix, allowing mobility. Such corridors may have social functions as well, including space for human activities such as recreation, visual amenities and aesthetics, and cohesion within a broader human and animal community.

With these core definitions and principles in mind, we have developed a set of design categories. These have built the foundation of our understanding of the wide range of opportunities available for corridor enhancement and rewilding in urban contexts. In the next section we summarize these examples synthesized from real-world operations, which include infrastructural features, as well as restoration work and nature-based approaches.