Approaches for developing urban forests from the cultural context of landscapes in Japan

Abstract

As it has often been said, we need to consider the delicate balance between human activities and the natural environment for the sustainable development of our living world. What seems to be important here is that in discussing this balance, we need to take into consideration the cultural aspects of the relationship between humans and nature as well as the physical aspects. Each city stands in a place (see e.g., Relph 1976; Tuan 1977) with its unique historical background, and it is irreplaceable. However, after the Industrial Revolution, some cities were developed as "industrial facilities", their only function being production and distribution. These cities could stand wherever functional spaces (not places) were available, and they didn't need the support of accumulated layers of history. Now in this post-industrial age, the problems of handling these kinds of cities are very challenging. Actually, converting these industrial spaces, so-called brownfields, into green fields such as forests may be viable. However, it seems to us that the problems cannot be solved by antiindustrial thinking such as "back to nature" or "ecological city" unless we also consider the historical or cultural characteristics of the places. The aim of this paper is to show how such cultural aspects can be included in the discussion about the problems of forests in cities. In other words, how can these new types of forests become the new landscape woven into the fabric of cultural context (Spirn 1998)? © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.