Tree Stands Between Forest and Plantation: Evolving Practices for Northern Sweden’s Boreal and Industrial Landscapes

By contrasting three ongoing research projects along with complementary arguments, this paper explores mediating practices from environmental art and architecture perspectives in the context of industrial forestry and Sweden’s ‘green transition’. The general discourse on ‘green transitions’ significantly amplifies the cultural and economic values of forests within and beyond Sweden. This amplification turns forests into reflexive entities that compel broader value revisions, challenging the extractivist character of modern urbanism. An example is the recent public debate in Sweden about what distinguishes a ‘forest’ (skog) from a ‘plantation’ (plantage). The debate does not reinforce the binary divide between the terms. Instead, it is prompting renewed, if overdue, attention to suppressed Indigenous and rural ancestries, as well as to alternative narratives and techniques that rethink industrial forestry tropes. From that context, our arguments position our respective research works—regarding 1) tree nurseries and climate injustice, 2) the transnational timber industry, and 3) new resource economies for the built environment—in ways which form and encourage research intersections that recognize ancestral, physical, and temporal scales as a potential for enriching the model that is the Swedish ‘green transition’

Drifting Space and Unruly Velocities: More-than-Human Marine Spatial Planning in the Fram Strait

This visual essay explores the translation of complex environments through representations with attributes that are summarized as ‘interdimensional’. These attributes are not elaborated yet, but the term emphasizes that these representations integrate different dimensions of experiencing and understanding various spatial scales and temporal perspectives. The process of producing these representations requires the landscape architect to encounter, investigate, and communicate life, materiality, and processes in an approach that appreciates attentiveness and creativity. The representations discussed were developed in the context of a design studio at the University of Edinburgh that was elaborated and led by the author and situated within the Highland Boundary Fault Zone in Scotland. A studio collective composed of Master’s students in Landscape Architecture over two years has been encouraged to traverse the fault zone, taking into account social, ecological, and geological fractures, as well as points of tension and upheaval. Operating from within the ‘critical zone’, the provocation of the late Bruno Latour and his collaborators has been adopted: that working from this perspective is necessary to recognize that we humans are ‘living among the living’ (Société d’Objets Cartographiques [SOC] 2018). The design studio’s approach encourages experimental drawing and making to develop ‘ecologically explicit’ landscape architecture—landscape interpretations and design propositions—that foreground and support more-than-human worlds

Co-creating Flemish Forestscapes

The paper explores the implementation of the afforestation programme in Flanders since 2019. Framed by the authors’ situated knowledge, it recounts the diverse strategies and tools of the programme, aimed at realising 4,000 hectares of new forests by 2024. With a focus on collective and systemic efforts, the paper outlines three operational domains to analyse the coalition-building process at regional and local levels: setting the institutional space, infrastructuring afforestation in spatial practice, and tailoring design tools for urban forestscapes. It explains how, beginning with the creation of the regional Forest Alliance coalition, a set of policies, soft power mechanisms, and designs have been promoted to accelerate the realisation of (sub)urban forest projects. In doing so, the article proposes a discussion on the forest metropolis as a contextualised cultural project, capable of aligning forest policies with urban forestry initiatives, as well as converging the urbanisms of territorial and domestic spheres, and positioning designers as crucial interfaces between these diverse realms

Plantations of the past: Tracing the Roots of the Urban Forest as Forestscape in the Early Modern Period of Delft 1500-1800

This paper expands on the term ‘urban forest’ through spatial historical research and via the concept of Forestscape. The city of Delft in the western part of the Netherlands is taken as a case study, with the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as the sample period. Based on a methodology examining the spatial history of Delft from both a processes and a patterns perspective, we identify six tree planting practices or ‘afforestation events’. These plantings were integral to the early modern cityscape to the extent that the spaces in which they were planted were typologically incomplete without them. We identify tree plantings in group, line, and volume arrangements and posit these arrangements as a foundational scale in a multi-scalar understanding of the urban forest. The term ‘plantation’ formed the leitmotif for these plantings, interpreting natural features such as copses, groves, woods, and forests. The case study also demonstrates how, even in the early modern period, tree arrangements were established for a variety of benefits which ostensibly resonate with the contemporary notion of ‘ecosystem services’, but that were instead part of an alternative sensibility of what ‘city’ and ‘nature’ is. In this frame, the term Forestscape offers a way forward to retroactively interpret the historic urban forest and counter the current binary city-versus-nature discourse. We find that the collection of tree arrangements established in Delft in the period 1500–1800 presents a ‘wooded watermark’ of the city, which in many instances was reanimated with new tree plantings, demonstrating how parts of an urban forest can become a fixture in the morphology of the city and the lives of its citizens. At the regional scale, the extent of tree plantings around Delft with urban ‘roots’ extends far into the urban hinterland, while at the same time, trees and wooded areas with rural ‘roots’ extend well into the urban area. This condition opens a discussion on the inter-relationship between urban and rural realms and challenges the simplistic division between these two worlds apparent in contemporary spatial planning and design

Urban Forest Living Lab - ‘Urban Symbiosis’: Vital Soil as Foundation for Future Proof Urban Forestscapes - Experimenting in Real Time Locations with Different Actors in The Hague

This essay reports on a ‘living lab’ approach to develop a new understanding of below- and above-ground ecological processes as the foundation for robust urban forest habitats. This experimental approach includes a series of design and implementation projects in the city of The Hague, the Netherlands. In contrast to mainstream greening projects led by local governments, these experiments enable urban trees to form more robust forest-like systems by creating a symbiosis between soil (organisms), trees, plant communities, and species. As implemented reference projects are limited, a learning-by-doing methodology was adopted. A transdisciplinary team, consisting of landscape architects/designers, arborists, botanists, municipal and private green space maintenance organizations, has initiated, implemented, and monitored a series of pilot projects. Analysis of ten natural reference locations in the surrounding countryside has helped to define natural and forest-like soil conditions and plant communities for the three living lab locations in the city. Local residents have been engaged in the design, implementation and maintenance process. Sharing insights so far contributes to the transition of reconnecting soil, nature, and people in cities

Peat, Actor and Design Tool: Engaging Experimental Drawing Methods in the Design Process

This essay explores integrating experimental graphic methods into the design process to engage with more-than-human worlds. It is based on the graduation project ‘RE-Peat: Different Futures for the Peat Polders, a Social-Ecological Landscape in the Netherlands,’ which aims to transform degraded peatlands. Through various representation techniques, such as hand-drawn perception drawings and Gaia-graphic representation, peat is positioned as an actor and a design tool. Such methods aim to foster environmental sensitivity and holistic design ideas, acknowledging the needs of both human and non-human actors

Urban Forestscapes

This issue of SPOOL elaborates a designerly perspective on urban forestry. Evidence has increased rapidly in the recent years to confirm the agency of trees and urban forests to cure a number of ills besetting urban societies. An expanding range of disciplines, in varying and novel combinations, are turning to an urban version of forestry to re-configure green (and grey) infrastructures, re-write neighbourhoods, re-purpose derelict territories and re-vitalize disparate peripheries. As such, in the face of the growing number of challenges facing cities globally, we see that urban trees and forests are becoming increasingly central to spatial planning and design practise. And yet, with all this work done on the environmental, ecological, technical and recently also urbanism-related aspects of urban forestry (cf. Journal of Landscape Architecture 1/2023), its site-specific, spatial, aesthetical, and cultural dimensions have received less attention in research. For us as SPOOL editors, this is an invitation to focus on trees and forests from the vantage point of landscape architecture and the related thread of SPOOL, called ‘landscape metropolis’. This thematic thread addresses the dynamic, composite, and layered urban landscape with all its biotic and abiotic elements from a design perspective, with the intent to transcend the conventional city-countryside dichotomy, and to understand landscape as a permanent underlying subtext of the urban condition, with repercussions into the remotest corners of the globe. From a landscape metropolis perspective, cities are understood as complex territorial mosaics where the conventional categories of urban and non-urban give way to a mix of material environments in various stages of ‘naturalness’, or to put it another way: natures in various stages of becoming ‘cultured’. Building on the potentials of an alternative reading of the urban territory then, in this issue we feature a number of select authors who elaborate on this condition, expanding on a designerly frame of knowing and doing in urban forestry. Publication formats also help: besides regular papers, visual essays are featured as a lesser-known yet highly appropriate category of exploration for design research

Re-Representations: Design-Agents in More-Than-Human Landscapes

This article explores the agency of representations to open up perspectives in more-than-human landscape design processes. It follows and investigates the approach of re-representations—multimodal assemblages that narrate landscapes as zones constituted by specific socio-material processes. Methods of research through and on design are combined: students’ experiments of designing with representations were set up in a landscape architecture design studio at the Technical University Berlin in the context of a deeply changing wetness regime in Lusatia, Germany. These design methods are investigated by synthesizing and comparing them with the aim of reflecting them in a post-humanist, new materialist discourse on the understanding of landscape and critical mapping. The findings concentrate on the most crucial agencies these re-representations have, to reorient design processes and reshape what is understood as landscape design in the shift to more-than-human worlds

The Forest Figure as Strategic Tool for Urban Transition: Research-by-Design on the Hollow Roads of the Western Witness Hill of Leuven

If the ambition of the Flemish territory is to become more forested, then an approximation is needed between forest and urbanization processes. Forest expansion can only be realized by developing a new understanding between forest and urbanization. This article discusses urban design explorations that stimulate a spatial transformation grafted on the forest as a structuring element of the Western Witness Hills of Leuven, through the ‘forest figure’. The forest figure is explored as a concept able to incorporate and mould urban and forest ambitions into a workable spatial frame

Building Biodiverse Urban Forests in the Post-Soviet City

This visual essay outlines how Ruderal, a studio based in Tbilisi, Georgia, has developed new approaches to urban forestry applicable to the legacy of Soviet-era forests. The collapse of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and the resulting rapid privatization led to the reduction and degradation of Tbilisi’s public spaces. Ruderal’s approach to urban forestry is presented in three projects: the Mtatsminda Pilot Project (including Narikala Ridge), the Betania House Forest Garden, and the Arsenal Oasis Project. The projects illustrate how a new practice of urban forestry has grown from the limitations and opportunities of Tbilisi’s urban context. Ruderal’s practice pursues interventions at multiple scales along the following forestry principles: 1) grafting into baseline conditions; 2) utilising and expanding the ‘fertile section’; 3) incorporating genetic diversity and species competition