People are trying to turn one of the world's biggest cities into a national park - and it might just work
The city was officially declared an urban forest in 2002. Now London could become a national park - sort of.
Advocates of the idea handed out their ambitious proposal to Londoners in July. Their bid is part of a larger campaign urging lawmakers to officially declare London the world's first National Park City, and it's gaining steam - the movement has drawn support from London's Assembly members, four London Councils and at least 100 organizations.
If you can't wrap your head around the idea of London as a national park, it might help to imagine a city where a self-governing body is responsible for looking after and increasing the amount of green space in the city. That's not too different from how a national park runs.
The United Kingdom already has 15 of those - protected areas of mountains, meadows, woods and wetlands stretching out in rural areas where locals bodies shape the landscape.
It was a trip to these national parks in 2013 that got geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison - founder of the Greater London National Park City initiative and one of National Geographic's emerging explorers - thinking.
"Considering that 10% of England and 7% of the UK is urban, I began to wonder why this very distinct and important kind of landscape wasn't represented within our family of national parks," he tells Tech Insider. "We go to national parks because we know they're special places where people care more for nature and enjoy the great outdoors. What if we applied exactly the same idea to the urban environment?"
For the past 18 months, Raven-Ellison has been trying to bring the national park model to the London landscape, which is home to 8.3 million people.
His movement aims to make green spaces easily accessible, connect kids with nature, clean up the city's air and water, and build affordable green homes.
Raven-Ellison imagines that city-dwellers could play a part, re-planting their paved-over front gardens and giving green makeovers to vast unused open spaces.
The bare bones
But that hasn't stopped the activists from soldiering on. Even withou the official go-ahead, they can create a non-profit body that cares for the National Park City.