Photo: Forest Classrooms are realized in partnership with TERRRA, an international network of architects, artists, and researchers with a research and pedagogical hub in Brezoi. Photograph: TERRRA

The INNATURE Demo Case 3 focuses on edible forest classrooms in the urban and rural settings of Brezoi, Romania. The case explores the role of nature-based solutions by design in revaluing cultural landscapes and associated traditional ecological skills and knowledge, while supporting biodiversity and diversifying economic activities connected to the agroecological systems associated with traditional orchards.

The town of Brezoi includes several villages and is surrounded by mountains that are 70% covered by woodland and protected as part of Parcul Natural Cozia. A significant portion of these woodlands is managed as traditional commons. While Brezoi was once an important logging town, centred around a major sawmill, over the last 20 years it has experienced economic and population decline, gradually transitioning towards a tourism-based economy centred around a blues festival. Within Brezoi and the wider region, fruit orchards play a significant role in the landscape system alongside the forests and pasture systems. Together, these form a gradient of different management practices in which traditional ecological knowledge continues to play an important role in rethinking how these practices might be diversified in response to climate change, economic, and cultural shifts.

Approaching the forest classroom through the orchard, in relation to both the forest/meadow systems and the Lotru river, opens up the opportunity to revalorise this important cultural landscape today through the framework of NBS/NEB. This includes both the restoring and revalorising orchards themselves, but also their relationship with the forest edges, meadows/pastures, the city centre, and river shores; water management; and local agroecological systems.

Contacts: innature.aaa@gmail.com

Main collaborators:

Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée

TERRRA

Brezoi Town

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