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Figure 1 Map of the town of Rye in central Jutland, Denmark. Peder Hansen Resen, Atlas Danicus, 1677.

ment grows in radial phases but is rather a hybrid constellation of frag-mented urban landscapes (Sieverts 2008: 253). A significant characteristic of fragmented urban landscapes is the dissolution of the former order and of the clear boundary between city and landscape. Instead of graduated boundaries and hierarchies, fragmented urban landscapes are complex functional systems, which are differentiated internally but outwardly collide without being able to communicate with each other or their sur-roundings.

This calls for a paradigm shift that redirects urbanism and landscape architecture towards those urbanization processes that take place at the urban peripheries where both technological and large-scale projects like afforestation need to be seen in relation to human practices. According to Sieverts, such projects should not only be based on intellectual-cognitive acknowledgements but also appeal to the senses and involve bodily expe-riences because fragmented urban landscapes only begin to speak within a design process that interlaces understanding and space (Sieverts 2011: 67).

In the following, how urban forest can be used in such interlacing will be shown; the concept of landscape infrastructure is used to formulate a landscape architecture of open-endedness which, rather than referring to a visually based and object oriented aesthetics, is deeply grounded in an aesthetics of change over time and an ethics involving care of and engage-ment in one’s everyday urban landscape.

Urban forests as landscape infrastructureFollowing the ideas elucidated by Konijnendijk and Sieverts, most of the new forest in Denmark will be placed in fragmented urban landscapes. Rather than seeing the forest as a ‘Sunday landscape’, ideal for recreation but separated from the urban domain, we need to acknowledge it as a deeply integrated part of the everyday urban landscape. This was some-thing Andersson was well aware of when he argued in 1965 that the forest edge could play an important role in creating new relationships between city and landscape in Denmark (Høyer 2002: 63). When consciously used as a kind of connective tissue it could help articulate an otherwise diffuse urban mass, make the fragmented urban landscapes appropriable and thus teach us to see and accept them for what they are: ‘In the fragmented areas there is room for more buildings and more trees’ (Andersson 1988: 24).

The forest, the city and the landscapeSince the first dwellings, the forest has played a key role in the develop-ment of Western civilization. It has been both a connection and demar-cation to another, outer, domain (Harrison 1992: 3) (Fig. 1). Whereas many of the first dwelling places were just a cleared space in the forest, urban development of the last decades has led to the point that we are now cre-ating the forest in the image of the city insofar as forestry is increasingly dominated by urban values, norms and demands (Konijnendijk 2008: 205). Since 1805, when a series of laws were implemented in Denmark to save the remaining forest from overcutting, forest cover in the country has ris-en from 2 to 3 per cent to approximately 11 per cent (Danish Nature Agency 2002: 5). Following government plans from 1989, this afforestation will continue long into the twenty-first century to cover a total of one quarter of Denmark’s land surface with forest.

Until the mid-twentieth century a forest was essentially a productive landscape but there has been a pronounced change in its role in Danish and other Western societies over recent decades. Today, afforestation in Denmark is closely linked to an increasingly urban society and is also jus-tified in terms of recreational amenity. This development is related to the emergence of a new urban condition in which the city can no longer be characterized as a demarcated domain surrounded by open countryside but is increasingly becoming part of growing urban regions comprising both city and countryside (Clemmensen, Daugaard & Nielsen 2010: 26). Ac-cording to Konijnendijk this means that forestry must engage with oth-er disciplines including urbanism and landscape architecture (2008: 205). Sieverts promotes similar interdisciplinarity because city and landscape can no longer be characterized as opposites; the city is no longer con-structed on a hierarchical order with a single centre from which develop-

In this paper the concept of landscape infrastructure is broadened to point towards a landscape architecture of open-endedness. Urban forests seem relevant for this broadening and the forest of Sletten in Denmark is used as a case study through which a theoretical discussion in a practical context is introduced. The emergence of fragmented urban landscapes as a new urban condition has led to new forest being created in the image of the city. This calls for a paradigm shift in the way new forest is designed and managed. Through Sletten, the author shows how openness towards self-organization and change over time can lead to aesthetics becoming intertwined with an ethics of care towards fragmented urban landscapes as our everyday surroundings.

ethics/aesthetics / landscape architecture landscape infrastructure / self-organization / urban forest

Konijnendijk has expressed a related view of the forest as a similar con-nective tissue. Basing his argument on an elaborate exposition of the re-lationship between forestry and urbanism, he emphasizes that urban for-ests can play an important role in creating awareness of the contemporary urban situation as a new, but as yet unrecognized, part of our everyday landscapes. He points out that urban forests can (re)connect society and nature in places where we work and live (Konijnendijk 2008: 123). In this act of reconnecting society and nature, the concept of landscape infrastruc-ture indicates a fruitful direction for landscape architecture as a materi-al design discipline engaged with open-endedness and change over time.

When is landscape infrastructure?Normally infrastructure is understood as something in or on which something else runs or moves, an inconspicuous underlying structure in the background of other activities. Using this interpretation, landscape can be characterized as the most basic infrastructure—literally the surface upon which all the objects and activities of nature and culture take place: ‘It is the set for the play that is existence’ (Raxworthy & Blood 2004: 10).

But according to sociologists Star and Ruhleder, who examine infor-mation infrastructures, the metaphor of infrastructure as background for other activities is neither usable nor precise when trying to estab-lish an understanding of how infrastructure works (Star & Ruhleder 1996: 113). They show how ambiguity and multiple forms of usage mark any real functioning system, and they emphasize that an infrastructure oc-curs when the tension between local and global is resolved. That is, an infrastructure occurs when local practices are assisted by a larger-scale technology, which can then be used in a natural and ready-to-hand fash-ion (1996: 114). According to Star and Ruhleder, landscape infrastructure is something that emerges for people in practice, connected to activities and structures. This is neither a physical nor a permanent location but a working relationship.

Stefan Darlan Boris Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark

Urban forest and landscape infrastructure: towards a landscape architecture of open-endedness

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as a further development of utilizing forest as infrastructure. Fairbrother (1970) advocated a similar structural use of urban forest and subsequent-ly a number of British ‘New Town’ planning projects incorporating usa-ble woodland infrastructure also took shape. The suburb of Birchwood, in Warrington New Town (in which Roland Gustavsson was also involved), exemplified this approach.

Sletten has an overall forest structure with eight integrated villages placed in close relation to the forest (Fig. 2). The area covers 160 hectares, which includes the overall structure of the forest as well as green wedges, village greens and local gardens between the individual houses and the forest. Sletten was established in three phases and is based on three differ-ent afforestation models. The first phase comprises thirty-six smaller for-est lots, each of 3,500 m2. It is based on the habitat model, where every lot has a distinct composition of species, selected from around sixty in total. The second phase is made up of three types of basic woodland: oak, birch and pine. It is based on the seed-spreading model, where an arrangement of seed-spreading bases with nine different tree species and nine differ-ent bush species will, over time, spread into the surrounding woodland

Thus, a broadening of the notion of landscape infrastructure is proposed. Instead of seeing landscape infrastructure only as a substrate or back-ground for other things it is foregrounded as a substance with its own experiential and performative qualities based on time and engagement. Therefore I do not ask: ‘What is landscape infrastructure?’ but instead: ‘When is landscape infrastructure?’

Sletten — a landscape infrastructure in the makingThe urban forest of Sletten can be seen as a landscape infrastructure in the making. The Danish municipality of Holstebro established Sletten in 1996 as a part of a network of landscape laboratories initiated by Swed-ish University of Agricultural Sciences in 1990, with landscape architects Roland Gustavsson and Carl Aage Rasmussen as two of the key initiators. The main idea behind Sletten is to create a 1:1 scale experimental plat-form where scientists and practitioners with different or no profession-al backgrounds can meet and collaborate on testing and developing new concepts for the design, establishment and management of urban for-ests (Gustavsson, Nielsen & Rasmussen 2005: 1). As such Sletten can be seen

Urban forest and landscape infrastructure: towards a landscape architecture of open-endedness Stefan Darlan Boris

tic enough to adapt to local needs and the requirements of the commu-nities using it, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across the site. By being an open framework for the entire site, it is weakly struc-tured in common use but becomes strongly structured in individual site use (Fig. 4).

The ‘passage points’ in Sletten show how, through use, the forest is constantly ‘becoming’. Here the act of ‘passage’ does not denote move-ment in quantitative terms, but instead movement as a qualitative change in the physical state of the forest. According to Connolly, to really move is not to go through a measurable trajectory; when a thing really moves it becomes other than itself, in a sense that makes movement a qualitative change. Movement affects both space and the bodies moving through it (Connolly 2004: 203).

Because of this movement Sletten appears to be systemic. New forms constantly emerge and change in a working and experiential relation-ship between the urban forest and its users. This is creative production that leads to passage points inside boundary objects becoming narrative, which ‘even if it is multiform and no longer unitary, thus continues to develop where frontiers and relations in space […] are concerned. Frag-mented and disseminated, it is continually concerned with marking out boundaries’ (De Certeau 1984: 125).

In the forest gardens of Sletten it is the users of the forest who mark out boundaries, create openings and engage in dialogue with natural processes. This illustrates how our experience of fragmented urban land-scapes will be predetermined towards static experience if temporality and engagement are omitted from our physical perceptions. As such the forest gardens represent a mode of production of subjectivity and space, where subjectivity is produced through different ways of inhabiting given sur-

to create new, self-organized forest stands of different species. The third phase is based on the gradient model, where different distances between the utilized species create a large spatial variety. The trees are planted on grid patterns that vary in size from 1.25 x 1.25 m to 2.5 x 5 m.

All three models incorporate a ‘collective zone’, where the inhabitants are free to use the forest as they see fit. In several cases this zone has ex-panded right across the forest and a large number of temporary and self-organized gardens have emerged (Fig. 3). These gardens show Sletten as a space of potential, open to change over time, evolving into a mosaic of for-est and garden typologies in continuous development and decline, with intentional and coincidental spaces of interaction in an increasing num-ber of spatially open, half-open and closed areas.

In Sletten, temporality and change can be seen as an expression of the relationship between natural and cultural processes. Whilst the forest it-self is more permanent, the integrated self-organized gardens function as individual ‘experimental spaces’ for the inhabitants and have a more tem-porary character. In spite of the forest’s planned structure, it is also open for self-organization.

Boundary objects and passage pointsSletten is remarkable for two related reasons: firstly the overall structure of the forest which, following Star and Griesemer, can be characterized as a boundary object, a term applied to objects that exist in more than one community of practice and are used as interfaces between them, and sec-ondly the different garden practices that emerge as self-organized ‘pas-sage points’ in relation to the forest (Star & Griesemer 1989: 394). The ‘pas-sage points’ emerge locally as a collection of gardens of various forms, shapes and sizes and show how the forest as a boundary object is plas-

Figure 2 Sletten. DDO ROland 2004

Figure 3 Collage of self-organized gardens in the forest of Sletten.

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places for dialogue but can be associated explicitly with the ideal of dia-logue itself, ‘as one needs to learn the language in terms of which living things are organized, in order to speak the world not as discrete things, but as dynamic relations, and to practice the art of managing complex, living systems’ (Bateson quoted in Spirn 2000: 25).

Towards a landscape architecture of open-endednessThe broadening of landscape infrastructure, here briefly presented through the Sletten example, makes visible the past, present and future connections between individual human behaviour, collective identity, small-scale complex systems and ecological processes. Foregrounding landscape infrastructure shows how a landscape architecture of open-end-edness can (re)connect society and nature. Urban forests like Sletten seem to be extremely relevant in this foregrounding: ‘In the depths of cultur-al memory forests remain the correlate of human transcendence. We call it the loss of nature, or the loss of wildlife habitat, or the loss of biodiver-sity, but underlying the ecological concern is perhaps a much deeper ap-prehension about the disappearance of boundaries, without which the human abode loses its grounding’ (Harrison 1992: 246).

As we learn from Sletten our practices and language change and our daily rhythms shift. Through this infrastructural broadening, the nature of aesthetics and ethics shift towards what Leach describes as open to the texture as much as to the text of everyday life (Leach 2005: 141). In this shift substrate becomes substance. Sletten shows how openness towards self-organization and change over time can lead to aesthetics becoming inter-twined with an ethics of care towards fragmented urban landscapes as our everyday surroundings.

roundings and where space is produced through ways of life being in-scribed in the surroundings. Instead of thinking of ‘the subjective’ and

‘the objective’ as opposites, Guattari argues that we should consider the more original situation of an ecosystem where the nature of the subjec-tive is conditioned in a particular situation and develops specific habitats and competences (Tygstrup 2009: 238). Landscape infrastructure in these terms can be described as a dense interwoven fabric that is simultane-ously dynamic, thoroughly ecological and even fragile. As a process of dis-covery, it implies intentional shaping, manipulation, and (re)creation. In an urban context, it also means the recovering of something lost—if not the precise forms of ecologies past, then an attachment to landscape, to rhythms of nature and to a place in its temporal unfolding (Lister 2007: 48).

Open-ended gardensWhereas the concept of the garden usually refers to an enclosed space, the open-ended gardens in Sletten are instrumental in establishing aware-ness of natural processes and creating situated knowledge of urban forest landscapes across several scales. They show how landscape infrastructure emerges where human time is unfolding together with natural time. In this sense the open-ended gardens emerging and disappearing in Sletten are not restrictive but in fact generative, marking out boundaries where the history of mankind takes place in its temporal unfolding.

Apart from representing this unfolding, the open-ended gardens in Sletten represent not only a special form of gardening but also a form of gathering places for people and cultural and natural processes (Fig. 5). This power of gathering is to a large extent about exchanging points of view and explains why the open-ended gardens in Sletten are not only

Urban forest and landscape infrastructure: towards a landscape architecture of open-endedness Stefan Darlan Boris

Figure 5 The gardens in Sletten are open-ended and change over time.

Figure 4 Self-organized garden in the forest of Sletten, 2008.

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B I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E S

Stefan Darlan Boris trained as a landscape architect at the

Aarhus School of Architecture from 1998 to 2004, graduat-

ing with a prize winning afforestation project; thereafter he

worked for two years as a professional landscape architect

on competition projects at Preben Skaarup Landscape Archi-

tects. In 2006 he began his PhD on ‘Urban Forest and Land-

scape Infrastructure’, which he defended in 2010 at the Aarhus

School of Architecture. Today Stefan is an assistant professor

of Landscape Architecture at the Aarhus School of Architec-

ture. His research interests range from ecology, landscape pro-

cesses, walking and weather to afforestation and wetland rec-

lamation in relation to fragmented urban landscapes. He is

currently working on a research project on urban landscapes,

memory and dissonant heritage in the Baltic Sea Region.

C O N T A C T

Stefan Darlan Boris Landscape Architect, Assistant Professor

Platform Urban Landscapes

Aarhus School of Architecture

Nørreport 20

8000 Aarhus C

Denmark

stefandarlan.boris@aarch.dk

Phone: 863 900 00

Fax: 861 306 45

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