Urban Forestry

Urban forestry is a research, education, valorization and advocacy initiative by the Section Landscape Architecture in the Department of Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft. It is about understanding, ordering and acting in cities centered on the most elementary component of the urban landscape: trees. Urban trees form part of the larger mosaic of the urban forest, and have traditionally had an important role in maintaining livability in cities. The urban forest in turn forms the backbone of urban green infrastructure, the network of green spaces which provide environmental, social, ecological and economic benefits to urban communities. The potential of urban trees has in recent decades been revised upwards and the urban forest is now increasingly seen as central to solutions for not only livable cities but also for challenges such as climate adaptation, the energy transition, health & well-being, urban equity and biodiversity conservation. These potentials play out in both the transformation of existing cities as well as urban expansions, and demand a major revision of the way in which trees and the urban forest can re-define green spaces and urban green infrastructure, via innovations in urban forestry. In addition, trees and urban forest have also been envisaged as leitmotifs for new approaches such as forest urbanism, and as a vehicle to realize new paradigms such as the Biocity of the future. This ‘upping of the stakes’ around urban forestry and forest urbanism calls for a fundamental reimagining of trees, forests and greenspace, of cities and urbanization, and ultimately of nature and our relationship to it. At the same time it requires a new level of knowledge and skills around urban trees and (urban) forestry, which can complement what has always been one of the core competencies of landscape architecture: the planning, design and management of trees and vegetation in the built environment.