SCENARIO 04: Building The Urban Forest
  • Spring 2014
  • Edited by Stephanie Carlisle, Nicholas Pevzner & Max Piana

Introduction: Building The Urban Forest

by Stephanie Carlisle, Nicholas Pevzner & Max Piana

The idea of the forest carries deep cultural significance. What do we know about how the urban forest works — as living machine, as novel ecosystem, as a site for ecosystem services, and as a spatially and culturally rich landscape?

Roundabout Vancouver

by Goodweather Collective

We envisage an entirely different city, one in which massive trees are no longer a rarity but instead fundamentally define and shape our movement through the urban fabric. With this action on the civic imagination, the city becomes a forest, and the forest a city.

West 8 Airport Landscape: Schiphol

by Adriaan Geuze & Maarten Buijs

To make sense of the fragmented territory of an ever-expanding Airport, West 8 planted a bombardment of trees. With hundreds, sometimes thousands at the same time, it was a strategy that worked everywhere.

Beyond Planting: An Urban Forestry Primer

by Max Piana & Blake Troxel

Urban forests are a complex system full of opportunity for study, innovation, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. This piece introduces key concepts, techniques, and challenges of urban forestry.

Invasive Species

by Dillon Marsh

In 1996 a palm tree appeared almost overnight in a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa.

Paradoxes Of Archetypes: The Urban And The Forest

by Keith Chung & Anna Misharina

In order for the urban forest to have social meaning, it must be legible as a form and as a system – revealing the workings of each entity through their juxtaposition.

Big Old Tree, New Big Easy

by Karen Lutsky

New Orleans' veteran trees have the ability to function socially, economically and hydologically. The potential of New Orleans' expansive canopies can be seen as a basis for a simple but powerful long-term planning and planting strategy for the city.

50,000 Trees

by Sarah Moos

50,000 Trees explores how a ubiquitous and overlooked urban space — the freeway overpass — can become a site to strategically offset a significant part of the city’s carbon emissions at the source, with a man-made productive forest grown for carbon sequestration.

Urban Forests As Landscape Artifacts

by Brian Davis & Jamie Vanucchi

The urban forest can’t pretend to be ‘natural’; it’s a construction that relies on both ecological processes as well as human ingenuity to survive. It marries the technical with the material, and expands the range of social experience and ecological resilience.

Building The Global Forest

by Richard Weller & Tatum Hands

If we accept that ‘the city’ is now a continuous system of global exploitation, then any discussion of the ‘urban forest’ should also scale up its thinking and ambition.