Rewilding: when nature becomes an agent of design

What if designing the landscape meant not designing it in its entirety? What if, instead of controlling every form, species, or path, design could create the conditions for natural processes — water, wind, vegetation, fauna, and time — to guide the transformation of a place? This inquiry raises a central question: what conditions can we create so that human action functions as support rather than imposing a form?

This investigation guided AO Factory – Rewilding: coexistence between design, nature, and landscape, held at Casa AO this month. Led by Greg Bousquet, Sávio Jobim, Carolina Passos, and Julia Lobo, the session presented part of an ongoing internal research initiative focused on regenerative processes and on the relationships and exchanges between architecture, landscape design, urbanism, and natural systems.

The research proposes a shift in perspective: moving away from understanding nature as an element to be inserted into a project and instead recognizing it as an existing, dynamic, and autonomous ecological process.

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What does it mean to restore agency to nature?

Rewilding does not mean reconstructing an idealized image of a landscape that existed before human presence. Nor is it simply about adding vegetation as a complement to built spaces. The question is how to create conditions for natural processes to regain autonomy and continue transforming the territory over time, within a logic of coexistence.

This perspective shifts design away from an anthropocentric logic based on control toward one guided by coexistence. The project no longer determines the outcome in its entirety, but instead creates the conditions for natural and organic processes to unfold. Human intervention remains present, but its role changes: rather than predetermining the design and form that nature should assume, it may prepare the soil, open paths for water, establish micro- and macro-drainage conditions, create continuity between ecosystems, or simply recognize where not to intervene. The project begins to ask less, “what form do we want to produce?” and more, “what support can we provide so that other agents can become part of the process and also help shape this construction?”

Renaturalization of the Aire River, Atelier Descombes Rampini + Superpositions, Geneva (Switzerland)

This could be observed in a case study on the renaturalization of the Aire River in Switzerland. Rather than precisely designing its new banks, the designers created a system based on a hexagonal grid informed by the topography, allowing the movement of the water itself to gradually define the new shape of the riverbanks. Erosion, traditionally understood as something to be contained, became part of the process of reconstructing the natural landscape.

The example reveals a fundamental shift: designing the object less and focusing more on the process and on creating the conditions for its transformation.

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From object to process

Throughout modernity, city and nature were treated as separate realms. Nature appeared as backdrop, ornament, or material to be guided and controlled. Paving, straightening, delimiting, and stabilizing were ways of asserting human dominance over the territory and over the very construction of the landscape.

Within Bruno Latour’s understanding of the Anthropocene, this separation between society and nature becomes increasingly fragile. Flooding, urban heat islands, biodiversity loss, and extreme climate events demonstrate that buildings and cities do not exist outside natural systems: they are part of them.

Drawing on references such as Gilles Clément, Lois Weinberger, and Stefano Mancuso, the research presented at AO Factory explored the possibility of replacing this opposition with a more integrated perspective. Nature ceases to be an inert backdrop and begins to participate in design decisions.

This means interpreting water, wind, soil, vegetation, and fauna not only as technical constraints, but as agents within a process capable of continuously transforming the spaces we inhabit.

The city of Paris provides an example of how this principle can operate at the urban scale. Through initiatives led by the municipality, small areas of soil connected to road infrastructure — such as central reservations, gardens, and sections of sidewalk — whose vegetation had previously been tightly controlled, can now be cultivated by residents themselves. Rather than establishing a single landscape design, the public authorities provide a minimal framework for action, with guidelines on maintenance, accessibility, and restrictions on pesticide use, allowing different forms of vegetation and appropriation to emerge over time. Transformation takes place through a combination of planning, community participation, and natural processes.

This logic also relates to broader urban transformations underway in Paris, where the reduction of space allocated to cars, the expansion of walkable areas, proximity between uses, and the growing presence of vegetation increasingly operate in an interconnected way. Nature is no longer merely a layer of landscape design, but becomes part of a wider discussion about mobility, microclimate, urban activation and local commerce, the quality of public space, and ways of living in the city.

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Permanence does not mean immobility

In this context, the question is no longer simply how permeable or green a project is, but rather: what is the quality of the space it gives back so that life can unfold? Inspired by Gilles Clément’s concept of the Third Landscape, this approach recognizes the value of seemingly residual areas: vacant lots, abandoned or underused spaces, or even places that have temporarily escaped planning.

These are places where spontaneous species find conditions to emerge and where biodiversity can develop precisely because of the absence of excessive control.

This does not mean abandoning design responsibility. On the contrary, it requires careful judgment about where to intervene, where to create support, and where to allow existing processes to continue.

Design therefore also comes to include the ability to identify spaces that do not need to be directly transformed. “Neglect” can be precise. Spontaneity can coexist with rigor. And architecture can learn to recognize that permanence does not mean immobility.

The Aspen Grove, Gilles Clemént

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From the city to interiors

Although rewilding may initially seem to be an essentially territorial discussion, AO has sought to investigate how its principles can operate across different scales of practice.

In urbanism, they can inform environmental and cartographic analyses and definitions, the implementation of green and blue infrastructure networks, nature-based macro- and micro-drainage solutions, biome restoration, and strategies for connecting green and open spaces.

In architecture, they can encourage buildings that are more permeable and integrated with the landscape, capable of working with natural ventilation, water, vegetation, shade, and fertile surfaces as components of the built system itself.

Even in interior environments, the reflection remains relevant. Opening a window and allowing wind to enter, reducing dependence on artificial lighting and climate-control systems, or creating a more direct interface between inside and outside are also ways of reconsidering the separation between architecture and nature.

The aim is not to artificially reproduce an ecosystem where it cannot exist. Rather, it is to investigate, at each scale, what the most sensitive interface might be between what is designed and the living systems already present in that place.

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Investigating before designing

For AO, incorporating these questions into practice means deepening something that has always been at the core of its method: investigating before proposing.

This investigation is also embedded within an existing knowledge structure in the office. AO’s Territory and Landscape group brings together professionals specialized in urbanism and landscape design, working transversally across projects and bringing territorial analysis, research, and conceptual thinking closer to design practice. Beyond this work, the research group also contributes to the development of the cartographic project Forest Gens, which seeks to broaden the understanding of the landscape and territory of Pan-Amazonia.

Presented as a Genealogy of the Forest, Forest Gens is based on a critical reading that questions the rigid separation between nature and society. Developed by POLES | Political Ecology of Space in collaboration with ARCHITECTS OFFICE, the project creates critical cartographies based on archaeological data and mapping, remote sensing, and territorial research in order to reveal the Amazon as a forest that has historically been inhabited, cultivated, and transformed through ancestral knowledge — a territory shaped by coexistence between humans and nature.

Forest Gens: Human-Nature Interrelations in Amazônia, POLES | Political Ecology of Space, AO | Architects Office

AO’s Territory and Landscape Research Group investigates transformations in contemporary territory through the intersection of architecture, urbanism, landscape design, ecology, and cartography. The group develops research that combines territorial analysis, data production, cartographic representation, and design experimentation as tools for understanding complex processes of transformation and imagining other forms of relationship between society, city, and nature.

Its research areas include the relationships between urbanization and ecological processes, rewilding strategies, critical cartographies, and new technologies for territorial representation and analysis. Its work encompasses independent research as well as collaborations with national and international institutions and researchers, resulting in cartographic projects, consulting, investigations, and publications.

More than producing representations of territory, the group seeks to explore cartography and research as instruments for investigation and knowledge production, capable of making visible the relationships, conflicts, and dynamics that shape the contemporary landscape.

Rewilding requires specific knowledge of the territory. Which species belong to that biome? Where did water flow before urbanization? Where are the flood-prone areas? Which fragments of vegetation still exist? How can topography contribute to drainage? Which plants emerge spontaneously? Which ecological relationships could be restored?

Maps, surveys, inventories, and research therefore no longer function merely as diagnostic documents, but as design instruments. Design emerges in synergy with natural processes.

In this sense, rewilding involves investigating how cities and architecture can move beyond merely incorporating nature and begin to coexist with it. It means understanding that a project does not end when construction is completed, and that landscapes are not finished settings: they grow, disappear, reappear, migrate, and reorganize themselves. The role of architecture is not to determine how all these transformations will occur, but to become part of a process that creates the conditions for them to happen.