Forest Urbanism in the Dispersed Flemish Territory

The increased attention to ecology in the last decades awakened a renewed interest in the relation between the city – in Flanders considered the dispersed Flemish territory as an extensive horizontal metropolis - and landscape. Landscape urbanism has expanded rapidly as a discipline and has been practiced in the dispersed Flemish territory for some time, especially through the notion of water urbanism, explicating the focus on water as a structural element. The relation of this territory to forest remains underexposed which might contribute to the tension between forest and urban, exacerbated in the last decade through public discussions on all sorts of fora, failed policy and a measurable decrease in forest in what is already one of the least forested regions in Europe.

Through seven case studies, this dissertation reveals the different exchanges and influences between forest and urban dynamics in Flanders. The cases build up a critical understanding of how they entangle in time and space, and how the revelation of the relation can be turned productive in rethinking the dispersed Flemish territory. In addition, the dissertation applies research-by-design as a methodology to explore possible futures for a more constructive forest-urban interplay, since they both function in similar fashion through three main understandings: forest and urban influence each other in their cyclic interaction; forest and urban are both spaces of mixity and multiplicity; finally, forest and urban both share an ideology that fits in the idiosyncratic view of society.