Landscape Architecture Frontiers

Industrial growth during the twentieth century, fueled by economies of extraction like coal mining, has produced severe environmental degradation and uniquely dispersed metropolitan areas. Silesia, a region of agglomerated mining towns in Southern Poland, is transitioning to a postextraction economy. Sulfur dioxide emissions and deposits of heavy metals altered the acidity of the land, making farming impossible. Terrain subsidence and slag heaps transformed the topography, forming new valleys and mountains. Over time, surface water bodies appeared, and a new forest grew. The Silesian forests remain a reflection, and also extension, of an extractive and extracted time.

As forests often demarcate the boundaries of growth, embody narratives of preservationism, and retain the trauma of industrial processes, the Civic Forest addresses the forests of Silesia as a new “center,” one that is capable through their scale and complexity to confront the current challenges and ambitions of the post-extraction metropolis.