We generally associate the wild with the forest (silva) and its inhabitants, wild beasts, savages (silvatici) and hermits. Anthropology has shown that these representations are all relative, and that for instance between Bantus and Pygmies, the signification of the edge between field and wood could be reversed. Contrary to common sense, which readily counts the savage first, and later the civilized, an ecumenal approach (centering on the meaning of human milieux for those who live in them) shows that, conversely, wildness was born at the moment when civilization appeared, when the inhabitants of the fields wanted to distinguish themselves from those of the woods, and later when those of the cities distinguished themselves from those of the fields. The social logic of these distinctions seems rather simple, but we do not measure their concrete effects on our ways of seeing as well as on our behaviours. One questions here in particular the meaning of the distinction between what is within the walls (the city) and what is without (the countryside, nature), notably by comparing the case of civilizations in which the wall was synonymous with the city (China…) with others in which cities did not have walls (Japan…), in order to draw some perspectives on contemporary urban sprawl, in which cities do not have any more walls, and the most artificial ways of life are lived as a return to nature.