‘Urban Forest’,
Nicosia, Cyprus

Tutors: Socrates Stratis

2010-11

The studio objectives are to give an urban role to large scale open spaces that are caught in the expansion of the contemporary urban archipelago. How to live by the edge of such open spaces, of ‘urban forests’, has become a design challenge, yielding to all sorts of hybrid spatial practices. The students were invited to formulate strategies that manage conflictual conditions between built and unbuilt, between manmade nature and urban environment. Such strategies attributed an active role to the ‘Urban Forests’ actors, human and non-human, and explicitly connected them to relevant networks of the larger metropolitan scale of the city. The study area is the Athalassa National Forest Park, located south to a park full of urban activities, increasingly pressured by the surrounded built environment, especially of public character.