The story of Yokohama’s Zoorasia and Forest Park Network cannot be told without first tracing the city’s post-war transformation and the pressures it produced on land, ecology, and public life. The second-biggest city in Japan, Yokohama, expanded quickly as a port and an industrial center following World War II. Its peripheries were being reshaped by suburbanization and metropolitan growth by the 1960s and 1970s, when housing estates, factories, and arterial roads had replaced farms and forests [1]. Once home to satoyama, the traditional managed forests that supported village economies and wildlife, the peri-urban borders were now degraded and fragmented [2]. Rapid expansion, which fuelled economic prosperity, also put a strain on natural systems and reduced the amount of public green space that a growing population could use.