Woods go Urban - Three Landscape Laboratories in Scandinavia

Woods go Urban - Three Landscape Laboratories in Scandinavia

With the first living laboratory created on Alnarp Campus in the 1980s, ‘Woods go urban’ delves into the three innovative landscape laboratories in Sweden. Explaining the hands-on design approach of integrating natural landscapes into urban environments, this book includes photographs, and illustrations, as well as detailed insights and knowledge from fourteen landscape architects and urban planners who were involved in these projects. Combined with creative management, interactive education, research, and citizen participation, discover new urban planning practices and a transdisciplinary model for healthier and more harmonious urban living environments.

Let’s bring the woods into our ‘cities’
The planet is urbanizing. More than fifty percent of human- ity lives in cities. Not all of those cities resemble the dense- ly populated city centers of, for example, historic Paris or towering Manhattan. Most of our cities are made up of loosely built-up areas where urban and countryside meets in a mix of residential districts, shopping centers, residual nature, industrial areas, highways, agricultural lands, farms and villages.
We need to increase the vegetation cover in these highly populated regions to adapt them to climate change and to support a wider range of ecosystem services : the conser- vation of biodiversity and the development of recreational areas. Parks and other types of green spaces need to be- come more wooded and urban woods must become a new dominant category of public space in urbanizing regions.

Cities of trees
People are naturally inclined to congregate in communi- ties. So are trees. Most trees live together in forests, wood- lands, or simply woods. We often say to one another, let’s go to the woods. But what if it was the other way around ? If the woods came to us, into our cities ? In academia, plan- ning, policy, as well as in society at large, claims about the benefits of urban woods are multiplying.

Laboratories in the woods
More than thirty years ago, three landscape laboratories were created in Sweden and Denmark to provide space for experiments with alternative forest development. Since then, the laboratories have evolved. They continuously de- veloped as an expression of the place-contextual dialogues and experiments between academics, students, practicians and residents. The laboratories represent an innovative approach in which design and management merge seam- lessly into creative management in space and time. All this in the search for answers to the pressing question of what urban woods can mean and thus become in the future.

Bridging knowledge cultures
In Woods go urban fourteen experienced landscape archi- tects with extensive academic and professional experience share – for the first time – their knowledge and insights on the creation and management of the landscape laborato- ries in Scandinavia.
Based on four decades with 1:1 experiments and hands on experiences in the landscape laboratories, deep knowledge is presented about how to actually cultivate urban woods in open-ended approaches where production, manage- ment, biodiversity, and aesthetics enrich each other.
The experiments and experiences bridges different disci- plines : forestry and landscape architecture, urban and rural culture, design and management, lay-person and special- ist. As such, Woods go urban provides insights for many professions and inspiration for urban regions, and entire nations that aim to transform policy goals and planning documents into creating and managing experienceable and living woods, in every place, now and for the future.

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