In the ever-present context of global warming and the acute loss of biodiversity, forests are at the centre of the reflections of theoreticians and practitioners around the globe. The contributions in this issue of JoLA take the stance that forests should also be at the centre of cities, the very places that, throughout the history of humankind, have fundamentally developed against forests, as Robert Harrison has masterfully shown in his epochal Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. As a primeval matrix that preceded humankind on earth, it is only the evolutional stadium of sedentarization that led to the progressive and often massive clearing of forests, with their edge gradually becoming ‘the edge of civilization’.

Forests—at least in the Western world—have long served as antinomic poles to the city, where the wild, the magic, the forbidden . . . unfolded in mysterious ways. This bipolarity became increasingly blurred with industrialization and the sprawling cities it produced, and then later suburbanization, and now the pressing climate crisis we are experiencing and the ever-faster growing deforestation rates that are redefining boundaries and, needless to say, are beyond alarming. Even if some parts of human societies still inhabit forested environments, today forests exist more as protected, endangered relics or as small remaining patches in overexploited urbanizing landscapes.