Afforestation is featured in many of the European cities’ climate strategies as means for carbon dioxide sequestration. The forest cover has been increasing in the last few decades in Europe for the first time in recorded history, and the north-western countries in particular are now planting large amounts of trees to make up for the losses that occurred in the past.

The Woodscapes project explores the possible roles of architects and urbanists in the afforestation of the urban peripheries and attempts to form an answer to the question of the possible value of nature for people in the future. What could nature offer us that the civilization cannot?

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Harrison, in "Forests - The Shadow of Civilization”, describes the forest as the counterpart to the man-made structures of our cities and societies. The wilderness of the natural woodlands has been perceived in the culture of the West as the "other” - the outside of human society and human law. In fact, the stem of the word forest comes from foris – Latin for outside.

The project builds on those contrasting but complementary characteristics of nature and civilization exploring the theme of the positive and negative in the vast, open landscape of muirs and hills north of Glasgow. This area, viewed by people as the domain of nature, consists of multiple layers of anthropological transformation that occurred across the years and affected its form and meaning. The visible reminders of the human intervention and the nature’s co-habitation within these anthropological added frameworks, form a landscape that brings the two opposites together to form a whole.

The proposed new forest park becomes a space of inversion inspired by the ritual of Saturnalia. The every-day rules of society cease to exist for a limited time when the participants of the inversion retreat inhabit the heart of the forest park inspired by the monastery typology. A return to physical, rather than intellectual labour balances out our society’s bias towards the functions of the mind. That disassociation facilitates a re-connection of the modern man to the body and highlights the relationship of men to nature.