Urban Nature at the Digital Age. From collective urban gardens to individual innovant micro-landscapes

The politicization of urban nature has become almost unavoidable, to the point that the City Council of Paris, like many others European cities, has for a long time been involved in the development of vegetalization’s projects in the city. Today the implementation of a corpus of public policies and programmes could be summed up in a desire to achieve great results (100 ha of nature in the city) through devices that are based on small-scale and high participatory value. Beginning with the history of nature in Paris from 1789 to the present day, the article seeks to understand if and how the place given to the inhabitants in relation to the res publica has evolved. The analysis underlines a shift that has taken place in the public policy approach to urban nature, concerning citizen participation in the city’s vegetalization projects: the management of nature which was carried out more by collective entities (associations) now seems to be more and more subject to an individual approach (citizen), which has become more widespread thanks to the use of digital platforms and applications.