The forest formerly known as

Abstract

The Anthropocene necessitates us to rethink the way in which care for and take care of the world we are part of. To acknowledge our entanglement with biotic and abiotic beings, but also our dominance over them and with that our responsibility for them. Employing this notion of responsibility, as well as care thinking as critical concepts for the built environment has manifold consequences for how we conceptualize, approach, and transform it. Regarding landscape and landscape architecture three realms of caring emerge as especially relevant: Repairing (reviving ecosystems humans have damaged), Relating (strengthening the human-nature and landscape-city relationship) and Reducing (limiting the anthropogenic impact on the environment).

Starting from this conceptualization of care, this graduation project is a speculative exploration of how the forest and forestry could be utilized to imagine a more caring relationship between human and landscape within the Zwischenstadt of Parkstad in Southern Limburg (NL). Forestry here is employed due to its multiscale and multidimensional characteristics – it has spatial, environmental, ecological, socio-cultural, and economic benefits. While the Zwischenstadt is chosen as a test case due to its ubiquity in the European, as well as global context. This dispersed type of urbanization is furthermore in need of alternative development strategies and trajectories, which careful and caring design can answer to. By working out a territorial forest strategy and masterplan, as well as localized design projections, the aim is to understand how forest infrastructure can revitalize the Zwischenstadt as an agent of care.

The result is a design proposal that reimagines the whole territory – from residential areas to industrial terrains etc.- as a forest, which can take on a variety of ecological and spatial forms. This forest becomes the principal agent of development for the Zwischenstadt, not only transforming the region environmentally and ecologically (Repair), but also reframing it spatially (Relate), while providing alternatives for the current shrinking condition (Reduce). Through this “all forest” approach the project questions supposed distinctions between landscape and city, the nature of urbanization and urbanity, the human commitment to landscape and ecosystem in the 21st century, as well as representation methods in (landscape) architecture.