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The popularity of wild bird feeding has introduced enormous amounts of additional food into the ecosystem, especially in urban areas. Significantly, all of this food is supplementary to the natural diet of the birds consuming it. For this reason, bird feeding has been likened to a supplementary feeding experiment on a global scale yet with no clear expectations of possible outcomes. This chapter investigated the likely consequences of this situation.

This chapter tells the story of Eden Place Nature Center, a 3.4-acre oasis of restored land located in an African American community on Chicago’s South Side, that was reclaimed over the course of several years after having been polluted and abused as an illegal dump site for decades. Michael and Amelia Howard, residents of the Fuller Park neighborhood in Chicago and the founders of Eden Place, galvanized local volunteers to clean up mountains of debris and created a safe and welcoming green space for their community’s citizens, who live in a deindustrialized environment marked by poverty, toxic pollution, and persistent violence. Eden Place has evolved into a space that welcomes both the tame and the wild, the human and nonhuman; provides a theater for their meaningful interaction; and stokes the innate wildness within its stewards and visitors. Through stories told by Michael Howard, this chapter reveals how Eden Place emerged as a multifaceted manifestation of the “urban wild.” Here people of all ages and races are rebuilding positive connections to nature, facilitating encounters with plants and animals, repairing a sense of community, and healing wounds of racial and environmental injustice inflicted over centuries.

The third chapter examines global urbanism as postcolonial. It concentrates on colonialism’s role in physically, ecologically and culturally re-structuring cities around the world, emphasizing the colonial shaping of urban landscapes –parks and botanical gardens - in Zanzibar and Port of Spain. The chapter shows the divergent, contested and reshaped character of the urban ecologies of these two settings in post-colonial times. British colonialism’s urban parks and gardens in both settings are the focus. Robert Orchard Williams, who served as curator of the botanic gardens of both colonies, serves as a foil for reflecting on the colonial legacy’s different refractions in these two post-colonial settings. The chapter also shows the agency of ordinary people in changing the environmental-spatial structure over time.