Silesia developed during the twentieth century mainly through the economy of coal. As new mines were opened, worker’s settlements followed along with infrastructure and services. This growth produced what we read today as a dispersed metropolitan area, where scattered industrial and extraction facilities are connected through railroads and motorways, where woodlands and water bodies exist as islands, framed by a low density, fragmented “city”. As coal extraction drove urbanization, housing followed in a relation of mutual dependence with mines and industry. Emissions of sulfur dioxide, deposits of heavy metals in the ground, and terrain subsidence due to mining have affected the acidity of the soil and the topography of the land, transforming over the span of 50 years the vegetation and the form of the region. Conifers were replaced by deciduous species; new water bodies appeared as a consequence of soil subsidence; farming for edibles became impossible. The current definition of “forest” as areas mainly occupied by hard wood species determines perimeters and boundaries subject to common vegetation patterns. According to this definition, forests in Silesia account for thirty percent of land cover, mainly located on publicly owned land. This reading, however, fails to define the forest as a political space, a component of the Silesian metropolis rather than its counterpart. The project proposes to address the forests of Silesia as new centers, capable through their scale and complexity to speak of the current problems and ambitions of the metropolis. The civic forest frames the collection of Silesian forests as a civic space; a space charged with a human agenda - environmental, economical and social - where to address ambitions and frictions between preservation, production, and extraction, through which to imagine new relations between domestic, productive, and protected spaces.