Sylvan City Design

Richly illustrated with the author’s exquisite drawings, this visual manual provides a concise and practical introduction to contemporary urban landscape architecture with trees and forest: Sylvan City Design.

Aimed at student and professional landscape architects and environmental designers, the manual will also appeal to other urban disciplines and to communities engaged with neighbourhood spaces in the context of the potential for trees to transform city living for climate resilience, green health, social equity, biodiversity and – at the same time – enriched urban culture.

A sylvan city is foremost ‘made, shaped or formed of woods or trees’. Catherine Dee sets out to demonstrate how and why settlements may be better designed by considering trees as the indispensable ‘ground’ of a city, forming a life-giving, long-term dwelling matrix into which buildings and built infrastructure are fitted.

The manual is organised in two parts. Part I: Principles, Strategies + Methods introduces the central aims of sylvan city design and establishes key design principles, strategies and ethos: 1 What is a Sylvan City? 2 What is Sylvan Design? 3 Sylvan Space, 4 Sylvan Time, 5 Sylvan Climate and 6 Sylvan Specificity, Diversity + Robustness.

Part II: Forms, Functions + Habitats explores context-specific design, illustrating a wide range of urban situations, scales and types of tree environment from tiny street corners through to city-wide tracts using the patterns: Forest, Locale, Greenway, Grove, Glade, Parkland, Avenue, Hedgerow, Thicket, Garden, Farm, Woodland, and Wilderness. In each section, the design approach is to refresh and re-orient long-practised forms of tree cultivation and ecological management by matching them with urban social, cultural and biodiversity functions to create a contemporary environmental language adaptable to evolving sylvan cities in diverse global regions and changing climates.

Communicated in vivid drawings inspiring new ways to dwell with trees, this is a DIY landscape architecture manual for all.