Paradoxical environmental conservation: Failure of an unplanned urban development as a driver of passive ecological restoration

The recent discipline of historical applied ecology has suggested that casual and context-specific circumstances may play a role in driving socio-ecosystems towards unpredictable changes. Here, we report a case study from Rome (Italy) where a recent history of unplanned stochastic events, beginning with illegal development of an abandoned factory, has unexpectedly turned a degraded industrial area into a site worth of conservation (about 300 plant species, 11 plant communities, 3 EU priority habitats, 62 bird species including 3 taxa of conservation concern at continental scale). Such a paradoxical history is discussed in the light of (i) the complexity arising from organizational, social and ecological systems occurring in this context and, (ii) the role of civic ecology, as a new approach in environmental conservation.