Forest Urbanisms is a design concept that places the forest at the center of urban, agricultural, and territorial organization. It rejects the modernist separation of land uses and instead calls for hybrid morphologies—where forestry, farming, and urbanism are interwoven—to recalibrate ecological systems and socio-cultural relations. As both a political and ecological project, Forest Urbanisms envisions an “Urban Forest Age” in which forests, from vast landscapes to pocket groves, act as catalysts for resilience, ethics, and justice.
The book Forest Urbanisms brings together underlying ideas, the concept of forest urbanism, and global practices and research that engage with forests through a critical and nuanced lens. Using the world is forest as the guiding principle, the authors put the forest in a central role of the spatial organization across regions, scales and quantities – from a solitary tree to an interplay of buildings and trees. This expanding notion of forest expects new morphologies and typologies of forest urbanism. The authors open the controversies regarding humankind’s relations to forests and offer thinking tools past the greenwashing paradigms.
This article by Kelly Shannon and Donielle Kaufman was first published on 9 January 2018. With the recent fires around Los Angeles, we are bringing it into focus again in early 2025 as it sheds light on processes and hidden corners of the context that brought about California’s ‘wildfire epidemic’.
Gary Hilderbrand has been teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1990 and is currently the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. He is also the founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, a leading landscape architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm was established in the […]
FOREST ENCOUNTERS: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, essays The European cooperation project FOREST ENCOUNTERS is looking for representations of different encounters with the forest from both human and non-human perspectives. The FOREST ENCOUNTERS project explores and proposes diverse imaginaries, concepts, and practices around the following questions: What and how can we learn with and through […]
IFLA Europe organizes a 3rd online event ‘Talk with Prof Ása L. Aradóttir on Restoration of native woodlands and sustainable forestry, on the 22nd of March 2024 at 13h CET Registration is required in advance for this event by following this link. The guest in this third Talk is Prof Ása L. Aradóttir, Professor, Department […]
The Harvard Graduate School of Design organized a two-day conference titled Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All? It is open to the public and available via streaming. Planetary survival in the Anthropocene crucially depends on the stewardship of resilient forest ecosystems worldwide—at the scales of wilderness, planted forests, metropolitan tracts, and the urban […]
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