Forests, Urbanism & the Productive Question.

Forests, Urbanism & the Productive Question investigates the relationship between forest landscapes and the circulation of wood within processes of ecological transition. It starts from the observation that climate change and the financialization of nature are transforming forests into strategic territories for carbon storage, biodiversity restoration, compensation, and renewable material production. Yet the material flows generated by these transformations are often organized through logistical and industrial systems disconnected from the territories in which forests grow, are managed, and acquire social and ecological value. Urbanization has always depended on extensive landscapes of extraction, cultivation, energy production, waste absorption, and material supply. Forests are part of this history. They have provided timber, fuel, industrial feedstocks, construction materials, and ecological services, while urban and industrial demands have repeatedly reshaped their form, governance, and temporal rhythms. However, forests are still often approached either as protected ecological reserves outside the urban condition or as productive landscapes reduced to resource supply. Wood follows a similar division: it is celebrated as a renewable construction material, while the territorial conditions of its production, circulation, processing, and use remain weakly examined. This dissertation revisits these separations by asking whether forests and wood can be understood as part of the same territorial metabolism. It focuses on Flanders, not as a representative case, but as a concentrated territorial condition. In one of Europe’s least forested and most densely urbanized regions, woodlands are scarce, fragmented, and embedded in a landscape shaped by dispersed settlement, infrastructural density, intensive land use, and strong competition for space. Forest expansion and adaptation must therefore be negotiated within existing claims on land, housing, agriculture, conservation, public access, and regional development. At the same time, Flanders is situated within wider European and industrial geographies. Regional afforestation programmes, national and landscape park policies, and European climate ambitions reposition forests as infrastructures of transition, while the region’s ports, petrochemical complexes, logistics networks, and bioeconomy agendas connect forest matter to broader processes of industrial reform. These overlapping conditions make Flanders a privileged terrain for examining how ecological transition becomes territorial. Building on debates in urban forestry, landscape urbanism, circular construction, bio-based materials, and forest urbanism, the dissertation approaches metabolic urbanism as an analytical and projective practice. It combines historical inquiry, discourse analysis, spatial investigation, fieldwork, and practice-based design research to examine whether forests and their material flows can be mobilized as infrastructures of urbanism, whether preservation and production can be reconsidered through design, and what forms of governance are required to coordinate forest transformation, wood circulation, productive capacity, and territorial care over time. The contribution of the dissertation is therefore twofold. Conceptually, it reframes the forest–wood relation as a territorial question of urbanism, moving beyond the opposition between ecological preservation and material production. Methodologically, it shows how design research can operate as a way to observe, assemble, test, and project relations that are still in formation. In doing so, the dissertation argues that ecological urbanization cannot be limited to greening cities or substituting materials. It requires a deeper reorganization of the spatial, institutional, and material relations through which forests, industries, buildings, and inhabited territories are produced together.