Renaturation, Aggradation, and the Ethics of Care: Toward a Socio-Ecological Ethics of Urban Design

Cities around the world are confronting interconnected challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and an increasing disconnection between people and nature. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with urban professionals in France and the United Kingdom, including urban planners, architects, landscape designers, and agricultural engineers, this paper examines renaturation and aggradation as design principles that reframe urban nature from ornamental to living infrastructure, grounding socio-ecological ethics in urban design. Our findings highlight a disciplinary gradient, while ecologists and landscape architects favor soil health, ecological processes, and long-term spontaneous evolution of nature, architects and planners emphasize legibility, predictability, and client-driven aesthetics. The results also show that across urban professions, some tension crystallizes around how much autonomy we can grant ecological processes to enable their cultural expression and legibility without sliding into performative greening. In this paper, we distinguish three pathways toward a socio-ecological ethics of design: (1) shifting from a mindset of controlling nature to one of co-evolution and adaptive management, (2) mobilizing an aesthetics as “cues to care” that make ecological complexity perceivable, and (3) organizing collective stewardship that treats urban nature as a public good. We argue that renaturation and aggradation, although not widely used in current professional discourse on urban green space planning, can operate as ecologies of repair, integrating biodiversity, soil recovery, and cultural memory. The paper concludes with implications for governance and professional education to sustain multispecies urban futures.