The Alnarp Landscape Laboratory (Sweden): an experimental forest for experience-based appropriation of landscape

Created forty years ago on the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) campus in Alnarp, near Mälmo, the Alnarp Landscape Laboratory is a narrow 15-hectare band of forest, where – over around sixty plots – experiments are conducted on forest plantation, with forestry, ecological and landscaping aims. Roland Gustavson and his team explore the various ways we can manage forests, by searching to determine, through forms inspired by specific management models, how to satisfy the demands of the forester or the ecologist, whilst offering visitors a rich and diversified experience.
The laboratory’s specificity lies in the integration of the dimension of landscape to its experiments. In other words, studying the spatial qualities of different forest structures and the associated experimental modalities they can offer. Research is based not only on observation, through drawing and measurement, but also on action (‘creative management’): the forest is accompanied throughout its evolution by the forester’s traditional hand to propose original forest areas, hence offering an alternative to the trivialisation of landscape.

Catherine Szanto is a landscaper who graduated in the United States (Master in Landscape Architecture) and a doctor in architecture. She teaches landscape and geography as assistant lecturer at the ENSA (National Graduate School of Architecture) in Paris-La Villette, and the history of the landscape project at the ESAJ (School of Landscape and Ecological Transition) in Paris. Her research focuses on the aesthetics of spatial perception through movement in gardens and public urban spaces. She co-directed a work published in 2023 on landscape laboratories.