Urban Trees and Architectural History
Clare Melhuish was invited to reflect on ‘how we should value trees’ in the penultimate Tree Rings webinar of this year’s Urban Trees Festival, co-ordinated by CPRE London (Saturday 22nd May, 1–2pm, chaired by Peter Fiennes). The panel, including Dr Irene Becci (UCL IAS; University of Lausanne) and Simon Needle (Birmingham City Council), was asked to consider how our value systems affect the way we treat trees and the wider natural world, and whether we value trees for their intrinsic or their utilitarian value.
As an anthropologist and an urbanist, rather than a philosopher, my contribution to this discussion is from an urban and cultural perspective that aims to open up some questions about the intrinsic value of urban trees to city dwellers. This stems from some recent work I’ve been involved in related to the Urban Forest, working with colleagues Mat Disney and Phil Wilkes in UCL Geography.
From Five Books on Architecture 1537–1575; after Vitruvius (Ten Books on Architecture, 27 BC)
Historically, cities have been celebrated as a triumph of human-imposed order over nature, as a refuge from the harsh, unpredictable realities of rural life, at the mercy of unpredictable nature. Taking an architectural historical perspective, we might point to Serlio’s Five Books of Architecture from the 16th Century (1537–1575) (fig 1), in which he expounded a concept of architectural and urban scenography based on the Tragic, Comic and Satyric scenes (after Vitruvius, 27 BC), each representing contrasting qualities of administrative-civic space; everyday/ordinary dwellings; and finally disorderly nature, comprising trees, caves, hills and other rural objects. These are completely absent from the first two scenes, in which the city is presented as a theatre for human affairs. Similarly, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) (fig 2) presents an image of an island 200 miles wide containing 54 walled cities, constructed for defence, in which uniformly designed houses are each equipped with a garden for flowers, fruits and vegetables — very much a tamed version of nature.
By contrast, the developing concept of the Urban Forest recognises the value of the natural environment and specifically trees in cities. However much of this debate is framed around utilitarian values linked to the function of trees, eg in carbon reduction and improved health outcomes (particularly during the pandemic) — even while planning, legal and fiscal frameworks that position trees as impediments to urban development, and a risk to public and private property, continue to support the removal of trees from cities. Indeed, urban trees embody the tensions between capitalist development and environmental conservation that have been highlighted in histories of colonial expansion by scholars such as Mimi Sheller (Sheller 2007).
Although many of us are aware of the historic symbolism that trees have held for different societies — representing powerful ideas of liberty and family continuity for example — these kinds of ideas often feel less tangible in cities amongst the competing demands of urban life. In policy discussions about the value of the urban forest, the social and cultural value of trees is defined in more pragmatic ways in order to aid the measurement of impact and policy implementation — in relation to environmental value, so-called ‘cultural services’ (Church et al 2014/cited Doick et al 2016), or ‘cultural ecosystem’ (i-Tree Eco/Treeconomics 2015), as well as 10 categories of ‘amenity value’ for ‘street trees’ (Dandy 2010) proposed by Forest Research.
But I think we need a fresh approach to understand the more intrinsic value that urban trees have for city dwellers of different backgrounds, generated through historical perspectives on how urban societies have interacted and lived with trees, in addition to grounded empirical research with communities to gauge their perception of value from different cultural perspectives.
At the UCL Urban Lab we’re passionate about cities, but we’re also passionate about urban nature, trees and the green infrastructure and ecosystem which supports cities to function properly, sustainably and smartly. Our founder was geographer Matthew Gandy who has authored a number of works on urban nature, as well as directing a film, Natura Urbana, on the ‘brachen’ of Berlin, micro-environments of rich biodiversity which have grown up in the bomb-damaged wastelands of the city in the post-war years. Looking back to the 1950s, our predecessor, the Centre for Urban Studies at UCL, was founded by sociologist Ruth Glass to combat what she called the ‘urba-phobia’ of the middle and upper-class British elite, embedded in a preference for country house living and social status defined by land ownership and exploitation of natural resources (including advanced deforestation).
But ironically, one of the notable historic characteristics of British towns and cities is the treescapes and green spaces which have been key to their design and conception, as a resource for recreation, community identity, and wellbeing among urban dwellers, since the 16th century. In fact the UK’s international reputation for naturalistic landscape and park design from the 18th century through to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement at the turn of the 19th has had a significant impact on evolving ideas of urban space, green infrastructure and the ‘green city’ through the Modern Movement and up to the present day. Le Corbusier’s Contemporary city for Three Million (1922) is illustrated with trees and green space amongst the point blocks to provide fresh air and recreation areas for inhabitants (fig 3), while Viennese architect Harry Gluck’s scheme for Inzersdorfer Strasse, Vienna, of the early 1970s, forwarded an approach to urban and housing design more fully integrated with trees and urban vegetation as part of his commitment to ‘the potential of the green city’ (fig 4) (see Steixner and Welzig’s recent volume, Luxury for All: Milestone in European Stepped Terrace Housing. Basel: Birkhauser 2020).
In fact, a more recent ‘ecological turn’ has led urbanists to turn their attention increasingly away from the city per se, and its so-called ‘urbanites’ (to cite Louis Wirth 1938), towards a better understanding of the relationship between cities, their rural hinterlands, and extended natural eco-systems, blurring the boundaries between interconnected manmade and natural infrastructures. This has occurred within an over-arching anthropocenic discourse of ecological collapse, climate breakdown, and ultimately human extinction. It follows on from several decades of celebration of the so-called ‘Urban Age’, and the assumption that the majority of the global population is destined to inhabit cities. But as a consequence of the accelerating rate of urbanisation across the world since the mid-20th century, and the concomitant increase in destructive carbon emissions, urban experts and citizens alike are confronting a crisis of urban and planetary sustainability which demands a turn back to nature — and trees in particular.
As our Urban Lab collaborator Gabriele Manoli from UCL Engineering has explained, cities consume 66% of the world’s energy, generate 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and modify mass and energy fluxes, with adverse consequences on ecosystem functioning and services as well as people’s wellbeing — despite still taking up only 3% of the world’s surface area. In last May’s Urban Tree Festival, as the first lockdown started to loosen its grip a little, we hosted our first Zoom webinar on urban trees in which Gabriele spoke on the importance of gathering quantitative metrics for evaluating the carbon neutralising functions trees as green infrastructure in cities, and Kate Jones from Life Sciences spoke about their mental and physical health benefits (see video of the talk here).
With regard to the latter, we should remember that for 85% of the UK population the so-called Urban Forest — including all forms of urban vegetation — is the main and most important interface with forested, natural landscapes, via everyday, tree-lined streets, parks, squares, connected back gardens and remnants of more ancient forest. And as a result of large-scale, highly contested, urban infrastructural transformations such as HS2, trees under threat — including those on our doorstep at UCL — have become the focus of renewed public attention, hand-in-hand with other forms of engagement with urban nature such as allotments and urban food production, and the green public spaces which have made life tolerable under lockdown. Indeed, it’s become an increasingly common sight to see trees adorned with scarves, ribbons and messages in our streets and parks, while direct action tactics against their destruction have taken on a distinctively spiritual or ‘New Age’ inflection — these range from Anne Stevens, vicar of St Pancras church, who made the news in January 2018 by chaining herself to a doomed plane tree near Euston station while dressed in her priests’ vestments (fig 5), to eco-activists, including the celebrated tree climber and tunneller Swampy (incidentally an employee of the UK’s Forestry Commission) who dug themselves into the ground in front of the station in January this year.
Such sights remind us of the primeval, spiritual and symbolic power that trees have exerted over rural and city dwellers alike throughout history. Geographers Mcnaghten and Urry suggest that, today:
‘Trees stand in opposition to manufactured goods, spectacularly those of arms and cars, the symbols of death and decay (Zelter, 1998). Hence the considerable numbers of people who dangerously place their own bodies in the way of earth-moving equipment so as to save the body of the tree, especially from new roads and airports. Many seem to feel particular affinities with trees since, like the upright human body, they appear majestically defenceless against progress, the modern and the scientific’. From their research with different focus groups in various parts of the country, they conclude that being close to trees ‘involves a complex resistance to the ‘others’ of work, study, domestic labour, the city, the modern’ (Mcnaghten and Urry 2000, 168, 180).
More recent shifts among city dwellers to fight for the preservation of urban trees, point not just to their utilitarian value in combating climate change and sustaining human physical and mental health, but also to their more intrinsic — symbolic and spiritual — value in the face of accelerating change and technological saturation. I think they do hold out hope in unexpected ways for a recovery and materialisation of the historic ‘green vision’ of our towns and cities which suffered in the explosion of materialism and ‘throw-away’ culture in the post-war decades. As the boundaries between urban and rural areas and social imaginaries become more blurred, through mobility, communications, and exchange of ideas and experience, there is also a vast expanding infrastructure of expertise in, and critical attention to, green urbanism, in addition to complementary forms of ecological expertise and restitution such as the greening of the world’s deserts. Harnessed to a popular, if not yet populist, urban ‘spiritual commodification through re-enchantment of the natural environment’, as my co-panellist Irene Becci has described it, this should provide us with grounds for optimism about a wider and more vocal recognition of the intrinsic value of trees in truly nature-smart cities.
An anthropologist specialising in architecture and the built environment, Dr Melhuish was appointed Director of UCL Urban Laboratory in 2018. Her work focuses on the design and social impact of largescale interventions in the urban environment in the post-war period, and she has conducted comparative research on university-led urban regeneration to inform UCL’s plans for the development of a new campus in east London (UCL East).
