Urban forestry is an education and research initiative in the section landscape architecture, set up to expand on the theoretical and design-technical aspects of urban forestry within the context of the built environment disciplines.

As the backbone of urban green infrastructure, urban trees have traditionally been central to the form and identity of cities and to their environmental, social, ecological and economic functioning. This centrality has in recent decades been revised upwards in parallel to the emergence of the concept of the Urban Forest. Understood as the collection of woody and associated vegetation on private, collective and public urban lands, the urban forest is seen as solution to urban climate adaptation, health & well-being in urban communities, and urban biodiversity conservation. These potentials play out in both urban transformations and urban expansion and invite a major revision of the way in which the urban forest shapes urban spaces and operationalizes urban green infrastructure.

This expanding agency has triggered the demand for new knowledge, skills and tools via the emerging discipline of urban forestry in amongst other domains the built environment disciplines, and in particular landscape architecture. Urban forestry complements in a particular and novel way one of the core competencies of landscape architecture: the planning, design and management of trees and vegetation in the built environment. The rise of the urban forest as lens to ‘read and write’ cities has also prompted approaches such as forest urbanism, and informed new paradigms such as the Biocity of the Future. By extension, the urban forest is catalyzing a fundamental reimagining of trees, forests and greenspace, of cities and urbanization, and ultimately of nature and our relationship to it.