This article considers the potential of Fourth Nature urban forestry tactics at Birrarung Marr—the City of Melbourne’s largest open space contribution in over 100 years—as a speculative planting and maintenance strategy for adapting to excessive heat and drought. This paper is structured in three parts. The first section briefly discusses the theoretical and adaptation qualities of spontaneous planting practices, such as Kowarik’s Fourth Nature philosophy, and its impact on the design and maintenance of Natur-Park Schöneberger Südgelände (Berlin). The second part introduces the designed landscape of Birrarung Marr and provides an overview of its evolving planting strategies and urban forest since 2002. It analyses how climate change, municipal policy and recent planting designs such as the Woody Meadow insertion have impacted—and continue to impact—changes to the park’s forest. Lastly, part three utilizes Schöneberger Südgelände as a reference to speculate on future planting design approaches and climate adaptation tactics for Birrarung Marr as the City of Melbourne seeks new design responses to predicted urban heating.

status: Published

In the ever-present context of global warming and the acute loss of biodiversity, forests are at the centre of the reflections of theoreticians and practitioners around the globe. The contributions in this issue of JoLA take the stance that forests should also be at the centre of cities, the very places that, throughout the history of humankind, have fundamentally developed against forests, as Robert Harrison has masterfully shown in his epochal Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. As a primeval matrix that preceded humankind on earth, it is only the evolutional stadium of sedentarization that led to the progressive and often massive clearing of forests, with their edge gradually becoming 'the edge of civilization'.¹Forests-at least in the Western world-have long served as antinomic poles to the city, where the wild, the magic, the forbidden . . . unfolded in mysterious ways. This bipolarity became increasingly blurred with industrialization and the sprawling cities it produced, and then later suburbanization, and now the pressing climate crisis we are experiencing and the ever-faster growing deforestation rates that are rede-fining boundaries and, needless to say, are beyond alarming.² Even if some parts of human societies still inhabit forested environments, today forests exist more as protected, endangered relics or as small remaining patches in overexploited urbanizing landscapes. As dynamic living environments, urban forested landscapes host biodiversity, birds, mammals and insects. They are places where vegetation layers interact with animals in complex ecosystems, which can be articulated through new equally complex measures such as soil horizons and underground hydrography. Scientists have long been exploring forested areas in cities, showing that relatively unbuilt and preserved areas such as natural mature forests or counterpart young pioneer spontaneous bosquets play an important role as biodiversity reservoirs that strengthen ecological networks. Research on such themes often focuses on landscape-ecological dynamics, adapted maintenance regimes, habitats and biodiversity in relation to urban patterns, spatial species distribution, ecosystems interactions, et cetera. Forests are also examined as a 'resource to be optimized, scientifically managed, and administered by experts' to answer contemporary issues such as urban densification, climatic prospects and biodiversity loss.³ From this perspective, forests and trees present a living architecture that can be managed, accommodated, structured and cared for, hence also designed. Forests can form territorial infrastructures that shape the contemporary metropolis, they can recolonize post-industrial landscapes, and they now even figure in the discourse of urban developers, marketing 'inhabited forests' in new generations of 'green' residential schemes. Forested environments can also sometimes be progressively re-established in urban contexts, through spontaneous recolonization or consciously designed silvicultural projects. Should we then envisage this new vision of the 'forested' city as a paradigmatic change? 4 New polarities are being created by inserting what used to be the englobing 'wild' outer world into the very centres of the city-the forest as the re-conqueror of its original antithesis. Of course, the ecosystemic and functional motives underlying this new orientation are overwhelming, but perhaps we can also decipher it as a symbolic inversion of polarities, a reconnection with the matrix of the origins. Maybe the notion of polarity itself can be questioned and overturned by a concept of porosity, a porosity that dynamically intertwines cities and forests. To nurture our thinking about porosity, it would be beneficial to shift our gaze to the non-Western context, where communities have been living in forested environments since ancestral times, in a relationship that is not based on domination, but on cooperation or even companionship with nature. Whichever the reading, humankind needs to reengage with the natural living world. This engagement cannot limit itself to ecosystemic, spatial, social or sheer functional aspects. It should also explore the history of this connection, the related cultural memories, myths and metaphors, as well as the moments of rupture

"The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life on the Capitalist Ruins." Journal of Landscape Architecture, 17(3), pp. 84–85

In 2016, Rudi van Etteger, Ian Thompson and Vera Vicenzotti reflected in JoLA on the relevance of aesthetic theory for landscape architecture in their paper, ‘Aesthetic Creation Theory and Landscape Architecture’. They explored the aesthetic creation of art through the eyes of philosopher Nick Zangwill. The discussion remained theoretical, so this paper builds on their work by applying Aesthetic Creation Theory (ACT) to a specific landscape design proposal, thereby testing its implications for the design process. The proposed design pays tribute to a disappearing glacier in a National Park in New Zealand by using aesthetic experience to engage with the loss itself. The described phases of Insight, Intention and Action guide the development of an explicit and grounded rationale for aesthetic decision making. The case confirms the legitimacy of applying aesthetic theory to landscape architecture, but also reveals its vulnerabilities. It offers a means to reflect on and discuss the relationship between theory and practice.