[ n 1, 2] ~ Can we grow forest inside a city in a not decorative but productive, edible, infrastructural and «wild» manner where human and forests live in peace? Growing the city into forest reach for a larger collective – providing and developing one of many nodes of a planetary movement to make cities into verdant carbon drawdown ecologies – that provide happiness, food and purpose to humans. This project aims to re-establish the long lost instinctual human craving to be one with nature – attempting to learn and follow the wisdom of plants and the relational laws and regulations of ecological significant others. Current city infrastructure has sidelined nature merely as decorative elements establishing a disconnect with each other.

( Phloem Phloem, Growing the City into Forest. 2020 )

 

[ n 1 , 3] They [sanctuaries] are constructed of trees, not cut down, but growing in their native soil. They said that on their earth there were trees of wonderful growth and height. These from their beginnings they arrange in order, so that they serve for porticos and walks, and by cutting and pruning the branches when they are tender, they fit and prepare them so that while they are growing they may intertwine and unite to make the base and floor of the sanctuary, and rise on the sides for the walls, and bend above into arches for the roof. By these means they construct the sanctuary Avith admirable art, elevated high above the earth, and they also prepare an ascent into it by successive branches of the trees extending out and firmly connected. Moreover they adorn the sanctuary without and within in various ways, by bending the leafy bows into various forms. Thus they build entire groves. But what these sanctuaries are withm, I was not permitted to see. It was only told me that the light of their sun is let into them through apertures between the branches, and is here and there transmitted through crystals, by which the light falling on the walls is variegated into colors like the rainbow, especially the colors blue and orange, which they love more than the rest. Such is their architecture, which they prefer to the most magnificent palaces of our earth. ( Emanuel Swedenborg, The Earths in the Universe)

[ n 1 , 4 ] Metropolitan life means access to the source of economic well-being, to all the institutions that make up the culture of a country, to the institutions of health, education, leisure, play interaction, and to the non-institutionalized aspects of private and collective life; short of this plenitude (access to it, that is to say), metropolitan life is not justifiable. In brief, the social animal is a lively and splendid animal, or it is a contemptible one, depending upon whether the city is to be sought for what is liveliest in man or whether it is a dump for all the parasitic aspects of his character.
(Paolo Soleri, Archology, https://www.organism.earth/library/document/arcology#p1-ch6)

[ n 2 , 1 ] We want to have certain benefits from the physical world. In seeking something for ourselves, we must recognize that obtaining what we want at the expense of other forms of life or of the earth itself is shortsighted and disrupts the balance that the whole fabric of life requires. Instead of the predatory jungle that the Anglo-Saxon imagination conjures up to analogize life, in which the most powerful swallows up the weak and unprotected, life is better understood as a tapestry or symphony in which each player has a specific part or role to play. We must be in our proper place and we must play our role at the appropriate moment. Mutual respect in many ways is a function of a strong sense of personal and communal identity, and it is significant that most of the tribes described themselves as “the people,” a distinct group with clearly defined values and patterns of behavior. (Vine Deloria Jr. “If you think about it, you will see that it is true.”