Stadt und Wald, eine neue Symbiose? (Essay) | Cities and forests – a new symbiosis? (essay)

Forests, from a natural sciences perspective, are long-living ecosystems. After fifty years of intensive environmental research, their crucial role in global and regional carbon and water cycles and in the development of biodiversity is now understood much better; therefore, the political efforts to protect forests have increased. However, if seen in too narrow a way, the paradigm of “protection” endangers the opening towards an integrated approach to urban design in which new and alternative types of forests may play an important role in the evolution of new cultural landscapes. It is a sociopolitical decision that is still to come.