>>723803835
Well, rice-fields are man-made environments, not what I would call "natural". Besides, that is rather universal, since most cities are located where they can be fed: if you take a train from Rome to Naples or Paris to Bordeaux or Stockholm to Copenhagen, you'll mostly see farms. But if you want to go hiking for a day then cities ought to cater to this (and well-designed cities do) by reserving space for recreational activities.
>>723804264
Even a lot of "wilderness" isn't "really" wild. While you can go outside the cell range and not see a sign of current human activity for days, the popular Koli national park in Finland for example isn't preserved for being untouched pristine nature, but being a historical site of slash-and-burn agriculture (and I suspect this sort of thing is rather common, only that I'm not personally familiar with these places - I would guess that e.g. Black Forest and such are similar in that they're far from being untouched).
Anyway, that's why I use "natural" in scare quotes, being well-aware that "truly pristine" forest (or a forest that has had several hundred years to recover) doesn't look AT ALL like what most people see when they think of a "forest", which is actually thoroughly man-made for-profit industrial forest.
And this is why I'm endorsing "city-nature": I agree we're talking about large parks, but if e.g. the King's hunting grounds haven't been sites of economic exploitation for some hundreds of years, or if some site was selected as a preserve and recreational area for citizens of rapidly industrializing city 150 years ago when people first started thinking about this sort of thing, they have a better chance of being "more natural" than 30 years old monoculture poised to be harvested in another 10 you'd find if you just plopped yourself into some random location in the countryside.
