Call for Participants / Summer school Forest Urbanism: Designing for Global Warming in the Mid-Belgian Plateau

Summer school Forest Urbanism

The summer field school seeks to prove that “forest urbanism” can help Flanders adapt to global warming. It can offer solutions to the most pressing consequences of global warming, such as more extreme flooding that alternates with longer periods of more intense drought, more CO2 emissions, and the staggering loss of biodiversity. Although the density of the Flemish spatial context doesn’t make it easy to tackle climate change impacts, since its open space has been exuberantly consumed during the 20th century due to suburbanization, there are sites that require significant transformation.

The 2022 summer field school will take place in three different sites across the Mid-Belgium Plateau where a rich variety of forest urbanism conditions occur that are articulated by the parallel river valleys of the Dender, Zenne, Dijle and Gete that are deeply carved out of the soft, fertile loam soil. The field school will concentrate on the landscapes around the Dender and Dijle valleys. The steep slopes of the Dender Valley are marked by forest pockets of the Flemish Ardennes, while the Dijle Valley has large forest pockets on its adjoining plateaus (amongst which the notorious Sonian Forest and Meerdaal Forest). The entire region is high urbanized and still growing. At the same time, the Flemish government has committed to massive reforestation and plans to plant 10,000 hectares of forest by 2030.