Past Program

How do our favourite parks and public spaces help us belong - to nature, to our cities, to each other - and can they help us rewild - not only our cities, but ourselves? Exploring lived experience this session will focus on how we create belonging in urban environments.

As part of the 2022 Nature of Cities Festival and continuing the work started at the Parks for the Planet Annual Forum 2021, this session, Belonging: Your Nature, Your City, connected participants around their experiences of belonging to nature, place, and people within the city. It encouraged participants to consider how interactions with nature in the city can help us rewild our cities and ourselves, fostering the notion that we are an integral and inseparable part of nature, no matter how urban.

Beyond this immediate aim, the session started a broader discussion on how belonging and not-belonging are created within cities and the role equitable access to quality parks and public space plays in this process. The session intentionally focused on people, their relationships, and their lived experiences in places, factors often overlooked or forgotten in the discourse on, planning and maintenance of parks and public spaces. 

This event was hosted as part of the Nature of Cities Festival 2022. Salzburg Global Seminar is not responsible for other sessions that took place at the festival or for any external communication you may have received from the festival organizers.