Urban Forests, Trees, and Greenspace

A Political Ecology Perspective

L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian, Sadia Butt, L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian, Sadia Butt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134687701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Silvicultura

Urban forests, trees and greenspace are critical in contemporary planning and development of the city. Their study is not only a question of the growth and conservation of green spaces, but also has social, cultural and psychological dimensions. This book brings a perspective of political ecology to the complexities of urban trees and forests through three themes: human agency in urban forests and greenspace; arboreal and greenspace agency in the urban landscape; and actions and interventions in the urban forest.

Contributors include leading authorities from North America and Europe from a range of disciplines, including forestry, ecology, geography, landscape design, municipal planning, environmental policy and environmental history.

1 Introduction

L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian and Sadia Butt

The world is networked, and always has been, but it is NOT flat, not socially and not ecologically. Neither is it a simple pyramid of predictable power with cybernetic power from above; we have always also had self-organization from below, … The challenge is to mesh social, ecological and technological domains in theories and models of rooted networks, relational webs and self-organized assemblages, all laced with power, and linked to territories across scale.

(Rocheleau and Roth, 2007: 436)

The oft-quoted statement by noted forester Jack Westoby that “forestry is not about trees, it is about people” is especially apt when considering urban forests, trees, and greenspace. Green areas are a function and product of the decisions and passions of people who manage, speak for, and often live close to them, including developers, forest experts, politicians, residents (be they homeowners, renters, squatters or the homeless), and environmentalists.

Urban forests and greenspace are clearly embraced by many cities. Witness Central Park in New York City, Tiergarten in Berlin, the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, Table Mountain in Cape Town, and the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore as evidence of the presence of urban parks in some of the largest cities of the world. These urban forests and green areas are recreational havens for local residents, attractions to tourists, even magnets for development and capitalist growth, and city icons that are well known across the world.

But urban forests, trees, and greenspace are not always embraced in all places, at all times, in similar ways, by all people. Green areas are often compromised in the quest for capitalist growth. Sometimes the destruction of such spaces is deliberate, a function of city builders and planners making conscious decisions to sacrifice trees to provide room for urban housing subdivisions, infrastructure, and industrial and commercial buildings. In other cases, greenspaces are occupied by rural to urban migrants who occupy land “illegally”, and use trees for building material and fuel wood in a desperate attempt to create and build a new life in the city.

Urban forests and trees can also elicit passions and conflicts among individuals. There are tensions between different visions of what urban forests, trees, and greenspace should look like. A shade tree for one person may constitute a blocked view for another. A gnarly or old and crumbling tree may be a source of admiration and beauty for some but a safety hazard to others. Urban forests and trees are also often unruly and unpredictable agents that resist the act of being managed. Trees contract diseases, attract insects, fall down during storms, and shed leaves, debris, and fruit that upset urban residents. People may prefer trees for aesthetic reasons, others may prefer utility trees that create shade or bear fruit, while still others do not like trees at all because of the work related to the clean-up of falling fruits, seeds, and leaves or because trees shade their vegetable gardens. Professional foresters and arborists have different preferences too. Some like native trees because of their connections to local ecologies and natural and cultural histories, others favour exotics because of their ease of growth and management.

Urban forestry or the science, culture, and art of managing trees—these practices suggest—is a politics that changes in space, scale, and time. In this book, we use a political ecology perspective to address some of the political issues in urban forest and greenspace management. Political ecology we define as the study of the dynamics of networks surrounding the historical and socio-economic context and political decisions, controversies, actions, and material and ecological processes that occur in and around greenspace and trees in the city (Rocheleau, 2008). One of the central premises of political ecology is that the concept of power exerts considerable control over the shape and distribution of urban forests. Such power comes in many shapes. Elected politicians do play a role but, equally importantly, political ecologists typically consider the social and economic power of wealthy and propertied institutions, groups, and individuals, as well as the discursive power of experts as relevant in setting the policy agenda and framing the debates around urban forests. Such frames can silence and marginalize the voices and interests of other groups, both humans and non-humans. But there are also resistances, contingencies, and challenges that emanate from marginalized human and nonhuman actors and it is in the interactions of these networks that the urban forest and greenspaces are formed.

In the following, we elaborate further our conception of the political ecology perspective on urban forests, trees, and greenspace. But before we do so, we present a critique of some of the current dominant approaches to the topic so as to situate our own approach and what we seek to contribute to the field.

Dominant Themes in Urban Forestry

Currently, almost 50 per cent of the world’s population inhabits 3 per cent of the earth’s land cover that is urbanized, making urban living an important subject for discussion and research (Singh et al., 2010). Parallel to this situation, there has been a steady growth in urban forestry and ecology research (Carreiro and Zipperer, 2011).

Urban forestry as a field of practice and research was well established by the 1980s in both North America and Europe (Konijnendijk et al., 2006). But research in developing countries, which have an average 44 per cent of their populations in urban areas, is on the rise. Urban forestry studies in countries such as India, the Philippines, Bolivia, and Brazil have been investigating diverse management issues, identifying many similar factors that impact urban forest management and conservation throughout the world (Andersson, 2003; Singh et al., 2010). In the US, urban and community forestry as a field and concept is further advanced due to the inclusion of a formalized urban forestry program at the federal and state levels. However, the top-down structure is not prevalent in practice in other nations. Research that has been accumulated under Tree US Aid projects has instigated exploration in this area that seeks to define an urban approach to community forestry, which has largely been studied through a livelihood approach.

Yet it is seldom recognized that such areas are political, that is, the product of human-based decisions that are not written in stone but that are open to interpretation and challenge. Instead, the urban forest is largely the unquestioned preserve and reserve of urban tree experts and professionals. The apolitical nature of urban forest management is expressed in several ways.

First, urban forest and greenspace are often seen as unidimensional, as providers of ecological, economic and health services for city populations (Salzman, 2006; Poudyal et al., 2012). From this perspective, urban trees constitute a part of the terrestrial lungs of the world that sequester carbon emissions in an era of climate change. They also offer an urban aesthetic that boosts property values of homes and whole neighbourhoods; cool residents by providing shade in the summer and wind breaks and warmth in the winter; stabilize soils and absorb water during storms; improve air and water quality; furnish urban wildlife with habitat and sustenance (Adams, 2005); serve as attenuators of urban noise, heat island mitigators, and biodiversity vessels; improve human health and well-being; and constitute a recreational haven for city dwellers in an otherwise artificial and often alienating urban environment. It is seldom, however, that trees and forests are considered as having non-monetary value or values unto themselves. And though the ecological services above are increasingly considered from a distributional perspective, that is, from the viewpoint of who may benefit more or less from these services (Van Herzele et al., 2005), urban trees are still presented as unproblematic public goods rather than as private goods that are bought, sold, and distributed unevenly across urban space.

A second problem that is related to dominant urban forest practice and research is the focus on developing, rather than questioning, the techniques and technologies used to document and evaluate the ecological services provided by trees and greenspace. This includes the use of Geographic Information System data to calculate how much urban area can be reforested, the carbon sink potential of the urban forest, and the many other ecological and further services provided by urban trees. One example is the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service’s i-Tree software program, a computer program that estimates the economic value of the urban forest and is marketed globally as a management tool for urban forest managers. There are also modelling techniques that record the benefits of the urban forest climatologically, especially as an asset to municipal infrastructure (McPherson et al., 1997; Nowak et al., 2002; Millward and Sabir, 2010). Such universal technologies and techniques risk homogenizing urban forest ecologies and functions thereby neglecting the uniqueness of local forests and trees and the local values, knowledge, and management practices that are associated with them.

A third problem with urban forest practices and research is that they are based on pluralist assumptions of governance that are largely uncritical of present power structures. Pluralism assumes that all stakeholders in current governance structures have, or can have, an equal voice. The objective for pluralists is, therefore, to seek to incorporate more voices into existing governing structures rather than to challenge and seek to conceive of different governance models. In the US, for example, research on urban forest management has focused on citizen participation after the advent of a national initiative to financially support municipalities to conserve urban forests. Such research has focused largely on profiles of citizens who participate in the federally funded Tree US Aid, defining the characteristics that increase participation and the willingness to pay for and support tree protection ordinances. The main premise of these studies is the recognition that effective management cannot be made solely with the few resources available to municipalities, but that public participation is economically sensible.

Pluralist interpretations also assert that an interdisciplinary approach is integral to informing the policy and governance to the on-ground management of urban forests (Rowntree, 1998; Elmendorf and Luloff, 2001; Kenney, 2003; Carreiro et al., 2008). In this instance, management and governance structures move away from an urban forestry for aesthetics alone to a more ecosystem-based and inclusive management strategy (Carreiro and Zipperer, 2011). Some scholars have explored multicultural aspects of urban forests in order to develop a more inclusive urban forest management (Fraser and Kenney, 2000).

A fourth aspect of the apolitical nature of urban forest practice is the existence of professional organizations that claim expertise and exclusive membership. The dominant strands of urban forestry research and practice are supported and maintained by various networks and conferences that share and develop strategies for sustainable urban forestry management. Such professional organizations resemble what Haas (1992) refers to as epistemic communities that are exclusive in membership and that adhere to similar sets of thought and practices surrounding urban forestry. Such thoughts and practices are not absolute but politically influenced as well as debated within the epistemic community (Forsyth, 2003). William Saunders and Bernhard Fernow wrote seminal accounts of urban forest management over a century ago (Saunders and Macoun, 1899; Fernow, 1910). Since then, there has been an exponential growth in studies on urban forests, trees, and greenspace management that is natural science-based and applied in nature (Carreiro et al., 2008). In 1997, the European Forum on Urban Forestry was established to promote discussion between urban forestry professionals, scientists, and policy-makers. The Forum is associated with the International Union of Forest Research Organizations’ urban forestry group, as well as with several European and Nordic networks for urban forestry. In Canada, where the editors of this book reside, the Canadian Urban Forest Conference was established in 1993. It is led by the Canadian Urban Forest Network, for which Tree Canada, the only national urban forest organization, is the secretariat. The Network is guided by a national steering committee whose mandate is to implement a Canadian Urban Forest Strategy (2013–2018). There is also a large body of international scholars and professionals that study, teach, and practice urban forestry. Professional and academic journals that address urban forestry issues include the Journal of Urban Forestry and Arboriculture and Urban Forestry and Urban Greening.

Most of the works of the above scholars tend to be apolitical and work more with governance design, empirical data, and applied solutions. These endeavours are certainly important but when designing policies it is also useful to take into account the proper historical and place-based contexts within which policy is implemented. In addition, it is important to address directly issues of environmental justice or how to educate the public on urban forest issues. In these ways, this book provides a comprehensive overview of multiple themes running throughout urban forestry.

Urban Forestry and Political Ecology

In this book we use a political ecology perspective to structure the chapters of the various contributors. We use the term perspective to denote that there are many variations of political ecology and that we are not committed to any one in particular (Forsyth, 2003; Robbins, 2004; Keil, 2003, 2005; Zimmer, 2010). The concept of a network, however, may be a particularly useful conceptual tool in political ecology. It is sometimes equated with Actor Network Theory, a theory associated with scholars such as John Law (2009) and Bruno Latour (2005). Actor Network Theory has been criticized for being theoretically weak and methodologically arbitrary because it does not identify any prime mover(s) in social and ecological change. But we still feel it is a powerful tool in appreciating the indeterminacy and contingency of change in the urban forest and the infinite number of (f)actors in urban social and ecological change. The power of a network approach lies in its ability to link disciplines and to “illuminate the ever complex connections between local and transnational social-ecological change and to understand complexity” (Birkenholtz, 2012: 303). But it also lies in looking for and evaluating the differential strengths of an infinite number of human and non-human actors and how they interact and change over time as articulated, for example, by Diane Rocheleau and Robin Roth in the quotation that begins this chapter.

In this book, the contributors identify their own specific set of actors and prime movers that vary from chapter to chapter. Some contributors work explicitly within a political ecology perspective. Others do not, though we have asked them to engage with the approach in some way. In the following chapters, we seek to bring out the unique approach of each contributor and their situatedness within the book as a whole. We identify three themes. In the first section, “Human Agency in Urban Forests and Greenspace”, the contributors develop theoretical and conceptual tools to examine how human actors affect urban forests, trees, and greenspace. These include the ways in which class, race, and gender affect the access and decisions made over urban forests, as well as the ways in which political economy, neoliberalism, institutional and legal structures and frames, and world city competition influence, and are implicated in, urban forest ecologies.

In the second section, “Arboreal and Greenspace Agency in the Urban Landscape”, contributors consider in more detail the role of the non-human, the arboreal, and the green, in affecting and being affected by the human world in different ways. In some instances, the effects are benign—trees and greenspace representing a positive influence on people’s sense of well-being, as expressed in sentiments that extend beyond the rational mind. On other occasions trees and urban forests may act unruly and unpredictably, behaving in manners that impact negatively on humans, like they do when growing too tall, extending their roots into sewer pipes and house foundations, and falling down or shedding branches on cars and power lines during storms.

In the final section, “Actions and Interventions in the Urban Forest”, the contributors write from the perspective of participants in shaping urban greenspace and trees as activists, embedded researchers, educators, planners, ecologists, and artists. Though academic in training, and therefore being reflexive in their approach, the contributors in this section also point to the passions and tactics behind taking action in everyday situations and the practical problems associated with such pursuits.

In the end, we hope that the sum of the whole of the book amounts to more than the individual chapters and that readers will be encouraged to read, compare, enjoy, and be inspired by all the chapters and what they bring to urban forestry and political ecology discourses.

Human Agency in Urban Forests and Greenspace

A political ecology approach acknowledges that the urban forest is a political and social construct, a creation of people’s preferences and choices, and the function of the visions of some humans prevailing over others in a process of institutional deliberation and contestation. From this perspective, the urban forest is defined by specific ideas and interests that both include and favour, exclude and marginalize, and typically benefit some individuals or groups of people more than others. Political ecologists consider urban forests as human co...