Towards an Asian Forest Urbanism
2023
Bruno DE MEULDER, Kelly SHANNON
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.
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