The presence of the forest in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany and Carei, Romania – occasion for cultural events

Nature builds a oasis of Paradise in the cities of today, which has to be rediscovered, like the sleeping princess in the fairy tale of the Grimm brothers. Its presence can be differenciated from the small garden of the house with a backyard and the derived typologies to the large landscape of the urban peripheries, like the green beld. To this landscape do the forest belong: it can be or not part of the green belt, space for periurban loisir.

In this contribution we will concentrate though in two different approaches to the forest. In Karlsruhe, in Germany, city which can be subordinated to the tradition of approaching the forest substance, the forest reaches till the centre of the city, building, even since setting the corner stone of the city, a Baroque city, a designed one, its Northern half. Different is the situation in Carei, Romania. Even if the city of Carei was thought as an aristocratic residence for a count, like Karlsruhe, here the model of the individual garden was adopted, not the urban one of integrating the forest. The castle is a variant of the individual house, surrounded by a large garden, which became today park, with the majority of the surface covered by a forest.

This is in fact also the topic of this work: the becoming of the forest designe in connection with the historic aristocratic residence today. Apart of the historic characted and of the importance for landscape history, the presence of such a natural pregnant element in the urban system through value and dimension constitutes an occasion for cultural events, different according to the approach of the country, namely the events designed to take place in the respective framework, and of the funds which can be accessed for this, including the possibilities of the new media.