“The Forest Has Become Our New Living Room” – The Critical Importance of Urban Forests During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Out of nowhere the COVID-19 pandemic has turned people’s everyday lives upside down. Public places in urban areas were closed. However, leaving the house for recreational and leisure purposes in nature was still allowed in Germany – even during lockdown in March and April of 2020. As a result, urban forests have gained unprecedented importance – not only for recreational activities, but also for maintaining social contacts and coping with psychological stress. With these diverse requirements, many people have appropriated urban forests in new and changed ways. Using the example of the forests around the southern German city of Freiburg, a team of researchers from the Department of Societal Change at the Forest Research Institute Baden-Württemberg (FVA) carried out a mixed-method study to investigate how these appropriation practices are working and to shed some light on the relevance of forests for city residents in these circumstances. In addition to the statistical analysis of an online questionnaire, ethnographic observation data and Instagram posts were analyzed. This methodological triangulation was carried out in order to purposefully combine the strengths of each method while at the same time reducing the intrinsic biases and blind spots. This resulted in a better understanding of the importance of urban forest during this extraordinary period of time. Our results show that urban forests became critically important during the lockdown. Many visitors appropriated the forest with very different motives and for different purposes. For many visitors, the forest provided the same functions during this extraordinary period that public spaces otherwise do. The forest was not only consumed as a natural space, but also constructed by visitors as a social space. We can illustrate how this social meaning was both negotiated and reproduced. To provide an abstraction of our results, we refer to the theory of spatial appropriation as well as to new approaches in sociology of space that conceptualize space as a network of social relations. These results give rise to broader questions for future research projects, recreational forest research, forest and health, and forest planning.

Forest Recreational Services in the Face of COVID-19 Pandemic Stress

“…The lower number of forest visitors in 2016 could be associated with other factors, such as socioeconomic characteristics and or climate. These factors could be studied in-depth to get to the gist of the discussion [66][67][68][69][70][71][72]. We conclude that, ceteris paribus, the studied data showed a notable trend in the COVID-19 lockdown period with special attention in March, April, and May 2021.…”

“…The lower number of forest visitors in 2016 could be associated with other factors, such as socioeconomic characteristics and or climate. These factors could be studied in-depth to get to the gist of the discussion [66][67][68][69][70][71][72].…”

“…As Weinbrenner et al [72] mentioned, many participants describe that they visited the forest to cope with psychological stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as fear of infection, de-limited working hours due to home office solutions, and a lack of social contacts. For many forest visitors, the forest has become a place of compensation.…”

“…Given the said levels of COVID-19 and mental health issues related [13][14][15]17,18], forest ecosystems services through scenery viewing, walking, riding, or jogging through the recreational areas [3,4,26,27,[60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72] offer relief. Geng et al [2] demonstrated a significant increase in the forest visit during the COVID-19.…”

Coping With Crisis: Green Space Use in Helsinki Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Similarly, Kajosaari and Pasanen (2021) found that in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, restorative experiences took place most often near blue areas and in large (>30 ha) recreational forests. In the light of restrictions on everyday movement, the mental construction of forests as the recovery of agency and control plays an important role in high visitation of forests (Weinbrenner et al, 2021), and these factors may also play a role in higher rates of visitation to areas of high tree cover density.…”