Since time immemorial, urban forestry and city tree planting have been part and parcel of the history of settling in Asia. Attention to urban forestry was a living tradition. It surely predates the late 20th century notions of urban forestry and forest urbanism. Trees are omnipresent (and create environmental quality) in the Chinese danwei housing estates (and production units) of the 1960s as much as in the monumental apartment blocks of Seoul of the same period or the average housing allotment in Vietnam, regardless the period. Intensive urban forestry resurfaced as a key element in the nation building projects as in India, Singapore, Vietnam, and China, where it is presently rearticulated in light of the project for an ecological civilization. Urban context or not, settling with and within forests has occurred for millennia in Asia. Indigenous forest-dwelling communities are part of a larger set of nature-culture worldviews and narratives, all which are deeply intertwined with socio-ecologically-articulated settlement practices. Although there are very different settlement patterns across Asia, with a variety of tissue components, they are more often than not systematically planted with trees. In the era of global warming, it is key to rearticulate this age-old tradition and exploit the acquired expertise, to face the consequences of the climate crisis, while simultaneously creating healthier settlements.
As the core concept of forest urbanism, urban forest is of great importance for a city’s sustainable development. It is a vital subsystem of urban compound ecosystem and evolve synergistically with other subsystems, as well as a significant landscape component to push forward realizing carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. This article proposes three approaches to improving the compound structures and functions of urban forests. First, enrich types and extend structures of urban forests to build forest cities. Second, move from constructing forests in the city towards integrating forests into the city to enhance compound ecological functions. Third, shift focus from forest ecosystems to urban ecosystems by a synergic construction of the urban forest and other types of ecosystems.
The paper argues that “wasteland” as a colonial land-use classification of India’s Aravalli Hills and its forest system in periurban Delhi and Gurgaon dilutes their socio-ecological contributions to the regional landscape. Over time, the land-use designation has become a means to convert “wastelands” to ecologically insensitive “productive” use. The paper critically describes successive socioecological transformations of the Aravalli Hills with respect to colonial and post-independence land management policies and various episodes of socio-environmental transformations, with a focus on its forests. The research applies learnings from various disciplines towards understanding urban environments and engages the lenses of landscape and urban planning, as well as social and environmental sciences. The paper contributes to building knowledge and recognition of the socio-ecological values of forest “wastelands” in India and broadens the discussion on their future within a transforming urban landscape. The case study provides invaluable lessons for other contexts where the natural resources, particularly forests, are threatened by development.
Walking physical activities can improve people’s health, for which exploring the influence mechanisms of green infrastructure on walking physical activities is important to the creation of healthy urban environment. This paper focuses on the relationship between green infrastructure in Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan urban agglomeration of China and the frequency and intensity of walking physical activities. The research first identified the elements of green infrastructure (i.e. hubs, links, and sites) and studied the spatial distribution of walking trajectories, then constructed the indicator system from perspectives of the internal environment, external environment, and landscape pattern of green infrastructure in the urban agglomeration, and employ the multiple linear regression model to analyze the influence mechanisms of green infrastructure on the frequency and intensity of walking physical activities. The results suggest that the walking physical activities mostly overlapped with the links and sites, and the indicators impact residents’ walking physical activities differently. Housing density, housing price, public toilet density, urban plaza density, bus stop density, percentage of green spaces, large patch index, and aggregation index all have significant correlations with both the frequency and intensity; land use mix, average daily temperature, and percentage of water body area only have significant correlations with intensity; and, path density only has a significant correlation with frequency. Based on the findings, this paper proposed suggestions for urban construction and renovation in aspects of internal environment, external environment, and landscape pattern, respectively, aiming to improve the cities’ walking environment, and boost the social and ecological values of green infrastructures in the urban agglomeration.
In high-density cities, relatively large area of buildings may accommodate increasing volumes of vertical greening, which will effectively help alleviate global climate change. This article emphasizes that landscape architects and constructors should refresh their understanding of urban forests and realize the role of vertical greening as its vital component. Although current practices of vertical greening are restricted by climatic environment, advances of technology and innovation of materials will provide new opportunities for the development of urban forests. For example, by utilizing a novel type of substrate, “base soil,” we can get rid of conventional vertical greening technologies that usually rely on pot-planting and frequent replacement, while enjoying more ecological benefits. This article also suggests employing prefabricated greening technologies to meet the ever-increasing demands of urban forests; establishing a systematic cost-benefit assessment system on vertical greening to measure the ecological, social, and economic values; and encouraging citizens to take a more active part in vertical greening practices by making them aware of environmental and social benefits brought by urban forests.
Ashley Scott Kelly and Xiaoxuan Lu’s recent publication Critical Landscape Planning During the Belt and Road Initiative emerges from their Landscape Architecture course on ecological planning at the University of Hong Kong lasted for several years. The book studies the landscape transformation along the China-Laos Railway, one of the earliest Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects. Targeted towards the audience of planners and allied professionals working in regional and transnational projects, the authors provide a comprehensive discussion on histories, planning pedagogies, and conceptual frameworks of global developments. Demonstrated through a series of studio proposals, the book can be seen as a provocative and ambitious experiment, in which Kelly and Lu challenge conventional epistemologies and protocols in landscape architecture research and professional practices. The review focuses on the authors’ conceptual and methodological frameworks to explore “critical landscape planning” as both pedagogical and practical practices. Additionally, this review invites critical reflections on the positionality of the landscape architecture discipline.
In the bustling heart of Bangkok, Thailand, the design team transformed a former tobacco factory into a vibrant new cultural landmark—Benjakitti Forest Park. The project faced a number of challenges including seasonal floods and droughts on the site, severe water pollution in the surroundings, poor accessibility, limited construction funds, and a compressed timeframe (only 18 months). The design has restored the site into an urban park with a resilient ecosystem that intercepts and reduces the destructive force of storm water, filters contaminated water, and provides much-needed wildlife habitat. Benjakitti Forest Park has not only become the largest public recreational venue for residents of downtown Bangkok and its environs, but also offers a low-maintenance, modular approach for worldwide urban public green space design practice.
Street trees are a crucial part of urban landscapes. Yet as we expect street trees to perform both as living natural systems and urban infrastructure, treatments of street trees are often contradicting as the roles of tree care transfer across commercial nursery practices and local tree care practices by governments, private organizations or local communities. With current discussions and practices for street trees scattered or segmented, this project calls for a data-driven approach that will allow us to view street trees as one systematic and vivid entity.
The project is situated in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana in the USA, a city that is facing issues of subsidence, hurricanes, and rising sea levels. With an urgent need to consider the future of both the urban trees and the city, as well as measured and recorded incidents of change and shock in the landscape, New Orleans provides a rich platform for observation, analysis, and speculation. Geo-spatial data mapping is utilized in parallel with human scaled studies with the aim of developing a discussion towards understanding and designing of street trees in a manner that stretches across individual instances and city-scale tree networks. Similarly, it is important for the work to address projected changes in time. From this approach, systematic and geo-spatial-data-based approach to urban tree planning is developed. The work results in a conceptual design solution that proposes a transition of tree care practices to become localized in the streets of the city, most critically a solution that allows us to shift street tree discussions and decision-making processes from individual trees to urban forests to better anticipate for urban street tree resilience.
In a high-density, human-centric urban setting, trees are often considered only as materials to structure spaces. The multiple damages and related causalities caused by fallen street trees in Hong Kong, China contributed to a destructive cultural connotation. Instead of ending up on top of a landfill, fallen trees on the Observatory Hill, an urban forest in Charlottesville, the USA are landing on the ground peacefully, nurturing the microcosm and teeming with new life for the ecosystem. It is a dead bounty and just the beginning of the tree’s life. Inspired by such as opposite experience of encountering fallen trees, this project started by challenging the cultural misconception of deadwood.
As a design project for the first foundation studio of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Virginia, the proposal aims to redefine decomposition as a joyful process and refine people’s general perception of deadwood through light interventions on the ground. Simple manipulations through landform, material assembly configuration, and visual prompts encourage interactions between people and deadwood. By navigating the amplified wood decomposition setting, a reciprocal relationship will be the productive result, acting as the agency for soil incubation. By experiencing the temporal evolution of decay spatially, one can recognize and embrace the beauty of deadwood.