A Dive in the Nordic Green. Foresturbia: a Manual for a Landscaped City

“Foresturbia” is the outcome of a practice-based research. It starts from a specific urban challenge of Oslo municipality towards 2030 and aims to be a precious support, a tool for encouraging and spreading collective shared knowledge about sustainable living. We acted in the vast field defined by the two extremes of pragmatism and utopia. Imagining a territory is the first and most powerful move to transform it. This imagination is powered by, is grounded on a specific attention towards the territory itself, it takes its strength from it. A fresh reading, a careful description, a precise proposal are equally important moves, that all together will form a shared, clear and powerful vision for the future of Oslo. “Foresturbia” is both a design proposal and a manual. The manual contains a wide array of landscape and urban strategies combined with technological solutions that should be taken into account by all decision makers, designers and citizens that will face the development of Oslo and possibly of other cities of the Nordic Countries, Russia and Canada. "Foresturbia" aims at setting new standards in the field of landscape, green approaches and practices, boosting the potentialities already available within the city. The aim is to introduce topics and strategies that could be very complex in a new immediate understanding. It is based and relies on a common language, which can be easily understood by a reasonably wide group of people. The manual is a cluster of instructions organized in correspondence with a detailed visual layout, in which both words and illustrations work together. Contents are split into sections, clustered, introduced one by one, in order to augment their readability and understanding. Texts and drawings don’t stand alone, as isolated items throughout the narration, but they form constellations of contents which define new horizons of meaning.