The Wooded Hillsides of the Meuse Valley in Liège (Belgium): An Unbeknownst Potential Urban Woodland?

The location and urban morphology of the city of Liège in the Meuse (Maas) valley, later the development of its industries and its port, were all conditioned by the natural geography of its site. Yet today the site itself and its natural characteristics are seldom perceptible from within the city. The drastic transformations of the site itself during the 19th century (the diversion and canalization of the river Meuse), the development of the infrastructures that along the valley and across the very center of the city (railways in the 19th century, highways in the 20th century), make the site difficult to perceive and to read. Overall, while the city is located in a beautiful site – as is well shown on early engraving and in written descriptions – the first impression of many visitors today is that of chaos and meaninglessness.
However, there are a few rare areas within the city and in its close surroundings where the landscape that surrounds the city can be embraced in one glance – with the canalized river in the center, lined with infrastructure, industry and housing, copped on both side by wooded hills. Indeed it is today the view of these wooded hills that defines the valley and makes its geomorphology understandable. But the woods are recent: 18th and 19th century maps, and even postcards from the beginning of the century show most of the hillsides to be agricultural fields, interspersed with some stone quarries. The woods therefore are young, the result of the recent abandoning of agricultural practice. Read as “abandonment”, as places of “no care”, they are today psychologically invisible, not thought of as part do the urban landscape.
Yet woods give a strong added value to an urban environment: the importance of wood for recreation and biodiversity is well known. The wooded hillsides of the Meuse valley could therefore become a strong asset for the city of Liège. The question then is: how to make these woods “visible”? What landscape architectural (design) tools to invent and to use in order to integrate them into the urban landscape as “urban forests”? – indeed, how to use them as a means to recreate a vision of Liège and the Meuse valley as “that quality that we call landscape” (Zagari)?
This paper doesn’t present “measurable” results. Rather, it presents a design-led thought experiment, as a prerequisite for actual experiments to be conducted in the spirit of R. Gustavsson’s “landscape laboratory” in Alnarp (Sweden).