Research Fellowship Urban Forestry

Urban greenspace forms an integral part of the urban fabric and its planning, design and management a critical focus for urban administrations, professionals and academia. This importance only increases with cities facing challenges such as climate adaptation, biodiversity loss and the health & well-being of urban communities. In recent decades new paradigms and discourses have emerged to understand, order and act in cities in response to these developments such as Urban Forestry. 

Urban forestry at the TU Delft is elaborated from the perspective of the built environment disciplines (in particular landscape architecture), whereby the ‘urban forest’ is nested within the concept of greenspace planning, design and management at various spatial scales, from individual trees on public and private lands, through to wooded streets, squares, parks and woodlands, neighbourhood green networks, and green-blue systems at the scale of city and urban region. The scales of urban forestry also reveal the multi-dimensionality of the urban forest in terms of urban environment, ecology, community and economy. As such, urban forestry encompasses all these dimensions and assumes their synergy to be fundamental to any sustainable urban environment.  The scales and thematic dimensions of the ‘urban forest’ form an overarching framework for a central research project: Delta City Tree Syntax which will result in a first Atlas of Urban Forestry, Netherlands. A second research project – Tree Architecture and Urban Microclimate – focusses specifically on the scale of the tree and environmental aspects associated with it. A third initiative is the development of a Research Agenda Urban Forestry 2020-2030, in collaboration with other knowledge institutions, government agencies and professionals bodies.