Plantations of the past

Abstract

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.