The nature of "wilderness" in the settler-colonial suburb

This intervention advocates for a relational accounting of "wilderness" - a settler-colonial construct often mapped onto an urban-nonurban binary that leaves the peri-urban natures of the suburbs and exurbs undertheorized in the production of White settler-colonial space. Taking Michigan as an example, I situate "the suburban park" against recent constructions of Detroit as an "empty urban wilderness" primed for redevelopment, and the fraught "wilderness" of Michigan's Upper Peninsula simultaneously claimed for resource extraction and conservation. Instead, I think through the suburban park as "wilder-ness" - a liminal, semi-tamed nature that is used, but not consumed; preserved, but not untouched; and distinct from the ways "wilderness" has been deployed to empty out and claim urbanized and nonurbanized spaces.