Cities Need More Trees

Here in Utrecht the Netherlands they are trying to greenify the city to reduce heat stress during the hot months. They try to plant as much trees and plants as possible, they try not to mow grass often and let it grow, they encourage homes to remove tiled gardens and add green, they have programs to turn roofs into green roofs.

I like it, the city feels nicer to life in.

https://healthyurbanliving.utrecht.nl/fileadmin/_processed_/...

https://healthyurbanliving.utrecht.nl/our-vision-for-utrecht...

https://aiph.org/floraculture/news/utrecht-is-crowned-the-ne...

One of my biggest complains for American cities is the risk adversity with respect to trees.

In SF, the city went in a rampage to prune and tear down trees (mostly ficus) because of the risk of the branches falling. There are lots of rules for where you can and can't plant trees based on road visibility, signage, electric cables etc. Result is that you have a lot of tree-less spaces in a city where basically anything grows.

In contrast, Mexico City has an almost anarchist version of urban greenery. Trees overflow streets and side walks. Yes, there are issues from dealing with the urban greenery, but the city is incredibly pleasant to walk in. Also, despite being an incredibly noisy city, trees and buildings mute out a lot of the noise.

Where I live, Sheffield in the UK, the council was nearly toppled because they chopped down some street trees. They still haven't fully recovered from it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protest...

Spent last week in South California, visiting family. Flying into LAX made me feel like I was flying into a hell scape. From the air, no green was visible for miles. Compared to my home (London, originally Manchester), I thought it not just odd but barely liveable. You could almost the heat off the concrete by looking at it from the air. Driving around as far south as Orange County for the next week I was happily surprised when I saw any indication of nature at all. Perhaps it’s just me and what I’m used to, but the only spot I visited that felt really relaxing was up around Griffith Observatory.

What I found incredibly uncomfortable when moving from Eastern to Western Europe is a lack of shade in residential areas. Yes, there’re parks, but the buildings often don’t have enough shade (anecdotal evidence). With the rising temperatures, many homes are exposed to sun whole day. I live in a city that’s been growing really fast and none of the newer residential houses have any trees around them. Mind you it takes many many years to grow a proper tree.

> You can still see a stark difference between rich and poor neighbourhoods to this day based purely on tree cover.

You can see that here in Sydney. The poorer Western Sydney suburbs have a noticeable lack of tree coverage when compared with the richer inner west, northern, and eastern suburbs.

I don't know which direction cause and effect goes. It is plausible that affluent suburbs can afford to plant trees, but it is also plausible, especially here in Australia, that trees lead to nicer climates that are more appealing to folks who can afford it.

One thing I'm very frustrated by is my city's(Salt Lake) push for water conservation to the point they're paying residential owners to xeriscape their property. We've spent over a century terraforming the desert into a beautiful green canopy, and every day they're building more concrete and asphalt jungles with nearly no greenery while existing properties are tearing out greenery and replacing it with rocks. We even had one politician try to say we needed to cut the trees in the canyon down to save the Salt Lake, because they're absorbing too much water.

In the state, residential water usage is almost a single-digit percentage and unmetered secondary water systems have been a standard feature of neighborhoods built over farmland. They're now going around putting meters on the secondary water systems and no new developments even have them at all.

I'm really worried as the city is beginning to resemble hellscapes like Las Vegas and LA. The developer-captured legislature is just pushing shit through without much thought for their livability or scalability. Couple legislative sessions ago they removed the requirement for them to review referenda brought by concerned residents, which is one of the only methods we still had to push back against overdevelopment.

Lots of chopping trees seems to come from a laziness of thinking, where certain people in the city adminsitration are just used to the idea "trees cause costs". They never think any further about benefits beyond finances.

The photo in the article looks amazing! You basically don't see a city, you see a vast woodland! An occasional rooftop peeking through here and there are the only signs of civilization.

I'd love to live in a place like that. London is a very green city by many standards, but it is nowhere close to appearing like the unbroken forest in the article. In fact, the thing I miss the most after having moved to the UK are the forests. Most of it is private and fenced off, and it's just tiny patches of woods anyway. It's interesting how different it is compared to Switzerland for example, where one can roam freely (at risk of being chased by an occasional herd of curious cows) and there are plenty of forests where one can escape civilization.

I think the department in charge of maintaining roads should also be put in charge of maintaining trees. Any time a road needs to be widened, make provisions for planting (or better) transplanting trees, including watering infrastructure.

> However, planting trees in cities is pretty much all upside with almost no downside (except that birds tend to shit on my car).

> So the next time you're enjoying a walk down a lovely shady street, take a look up and appreciate the trees.

Author seems to be contradicting themselves (:

I understand that tall trees a threat to capital and maybe also to human life when one falls over near a house, but do we really need to chop them down?

Can we not add metal struts between a house and a tall tree, to reinforce its strength, rather than preemptively cut it every time?

Does anyone have a "greenery index" of world cities?

I read somewhere that trees help seed clouds, thus causing rain (or maybe just moisture in the air? I forget), though it seems like it's also a vicious cycle - the areas not in drought continue to not be in drought, whereas areas that are lose trees that could've seeded clouds, and thus rain. That said, I agree with the points made in the article. "Trees are good" is a pretty uncontroversial stance. Should be, anyway. I do wonder, if the biophilia thing is real, and it seems reasonable that it is - are some trees better at creating this effect than others, even if the same size? If so, does it vary by region, cultural/ethnic background, etc., and what do those trees that are unusually biophilia-inducing have in common? I have no idea what the answers to those questions are, and there's a lot of speculation before you need to ask it, but it seems like some university or government or something should be researching those questions right now, what with all the plans to make cities greener.

I recently visited Tbilisi in Georgia which is also almost a city within a forest. It is very nice and something I would wish upon any city.

However, it does take it toll on buildings and infrastructure.

I wonder what Johannesburg spends per tree in not just cutting and leaf collection but also in addition road and pavement repairs and I’m sure there is more than one foundation that has been damaged by roots.

When I lived in Delhi, my home was near the ridge area of North Campus. Its a lush forest with shrubs, ferns, and subtropical hard trees with a few lakes. The temperature difference, the coolness in air and the vibe difference from the rest of the city was like night and day.

Cities have too much thermal mass exposed to the Sun, that's is. As a result they makes heat domes between buildings and you can't reduce much the thermal mass with trees because you still have all the buildings.

A solution is new buildings "coated" with light air-gapped panels where air between them and the core structure of the building is free to slowly climb and going outside in the atmosphere. Of course you can't do so on glass facade walls. And it's hard to do on most existing buildings. Also you can't do much for the large asphalted area.

Like it or not, cities and global heating are incompatible, as cities and many other aspects of the modernity.

When I tell people I live in Berlin, they often make a face and disparage it for being an "ugly" city - and to a certain extent I agree with them... if they've only visited the tourist heavy central areas (Alexanderplatz, Friedrichstrasse, and much of Mitte), where there is a notable lack of greenery.

What I try to remind them of, is that there are more parks, gardens, and forest here than any other capital city, and that those areas will go toe-to-toe beauty wise with anywhere.

Additionally, as temperatures rise (and there's a lack of indoor refuges due to AC being uncommon), finding respite among the greenery is one of the only foolproof ways to cut the heat here.

Would love to see them tear up highways and build forests and not the other way around

I live in big historocal city in Czechia. Trees are rare here. Those few trees have trimmed crowns regularly, every spring they left only trunk with some shot cuted branches. It looks terrible and makes trees weaker.

Arguments are that trees are dangerous and could fall on property or peopel walking under and that it not fits in historical concept of city.

It is impossible to stay on main square during summer and overall aesthetic of treeless streets is sad. It's actually biggest downside of my city.

Every time I visit Germany or Austria, I envy those green cities.

Dense urban-type settlements attracted billions (and continue to do so worldwide) as they offer hard-to-beat advantages. But as these gains are booked and largely taken for granted, people long for the paradise lost, the walkability, the green spaces etc.

Anecdotaly the pandemic may have hastened this realisation, as people resorted to walking in larger numbers. Walking around tree-lined streets with lots of natural looking grass and flower beds certainly beats doing the same in a car infested concrete jungle.

I also grew up in Johannesburg, and really miss those trees. When you drive a little bit out of the city you see a completely different landscape.

However I'm sceptical about the author's claim that there's no downside. I would assume that most of the trees are not native, and in any case definitely don't grow natively at that density. Feels like there's no free lunch in ecology: is mass tree-planting an exception?

Canberra is heavenly in terms of number of trees. Acres of parkland, farmland or wild bush near every part of the city. As well as treelined streets.

We have the same issue in my city with respect to areas lacking trees.

The trees in the more affluent areas tend to be better maintained by property owners, and replacement trees are planted when trees are lost in ice and wind storms.

The city's forestry department is working on a long-term solution to this problem but it takes time to grow trees.

Living in Brooklyn, I always prefer to explore east/west instead of north/south. This is because the streets have trees, while the avenues are exposed. In the hot summer months you’ll have a delightful walk down Bergen, then absolutely bake on Franklin or Nostrand.

I just wish they wouldn’t plant acorn trees anywhere near a road, squirrels just end up in a kill zone

Trees are nothing but obstacles to traffic. If you take a good look at cities, you will see that they were built for cars, and cars alone. Anything that's not a car has no place in a city.

Simply remove cars, 40% more space

EAB is definitely making sure we cut down more than ever!

Please tell this to mediaval towns in Italy.

my city is the largest urban forest.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/07/london...

Trees in cities, just taking up valuable space, handing out shade and oxygen equally and for free, like them there communisms. Their leaves might turn red in autumn, but they are red inside all year, these woody marxist menaces!