7 minute read
The politics of street trees revisited
Trees are at the heart of civic life, yet despite the recent apology from Sheffield City Council, there is little ground for optimism
When we concluded The Politics of Street Trees, a collected volume of essays on the topic, written in the aftermath of Sheffield’s street tree destruction crisis, we ended with the positive wish that the book might bring ‘succour to campaigners, insight to students, ammunition to politicians, and deeper knowledge to practitioners. The book followed a conference held in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield in 2019 on the topic of Street Trees and Politics, which brought together practitioners (in both arboriculture and landscape architecture), activists, academics and others to discuss the crisis that had unfolded in the decade before. The conference intended to combine interdisciplinary and international perspectives on the planting and protection of street trees, framing what had happened in Sheffield alongside other examples within a historical canon and with a firm focus upon politics.
Sheffield had gained the unfortunate moniker of ‘Stump City’ after the city council entered a punitive Public Finance Initiative (PFI) arrangement with the multinational corporation AMEY to have the city’s streets and roads repaired. Titled ‘Streets Ahead’, this programme was set to counter what the city’s previous moniker had been: ‘Pothole City’. So far, so optimistic, but what soon became clear is that the city’s trees were being felled at an alarming rate, prompting widespread public outcry and an extraordinary campaign to protect the city’s trees. This campaign has been recorded in the film The Felling, on the Sheffield Tree Action Group website, and in the book Persons Unknown.
The impact upon Sheffield has been profound: the protest against the incumbent councillors led to a referendum led by It’s Our City (a community-led citizens’ network), which changed the structure of the council from a ‘strong leader’ model to one following a committee structure. The publication of the independent review in March 2023 declared it a ‘dark episode’ in Sheffield, and in the local elections in May, Labour – who had run the council throughout the tree debacle – lost their majority. But alongside the political collateral there have been some green shoots, with the publication of a Sheffield Street Tree Strategy, establishment of the Sheffield Street Tree Partnership and the emergence of community groups in the city like Kids Plant Trees and Abbeydale Street Trees.
It began to feel like the tide was turning on the protection and retention of trees in the urban realm, or at the very least that there was more nuance entering the conversation. But this article cannot do justice to the events that unfolded in Sheffield, and it must be noted that the impact of over a decade of the economic politics of austerity played a part. The impact of long- and short-term financial decision-making within national and local government has a huge impact on the health and wellbeing of urban trees, and so it made grim reading that in March this year Plymouth City Council had ‘done a Sheffield’.
‘Doing a Sheffield’ meant contractors felling 110 trees during the night of the 14 March, starting at 8pm in the evening and coinciding with the end of the financial year and the potential withdrawal of funding for the programme. This echoed the ‘dawn raid’ that had been organised by Sheffield City Council on Rustlings Road, itself one of the most notorious incidents in the crisis. And much like Sheffield, people in Plymouth had felt compelled to try and prevent the felling, setting up STRAW (Save the Trees of Armada Way) and garnering coverage in The Times and Guardian in advance of the shock felling.
The fallout was swift, with photos of the felled trees quickly circulating online, communicating the scale and impact of what happened in Plymouth. This resulted in the speedy defence and then resignation of the leader of the council, but his defenestration was not the sole consequence, with rumours circulating in May that people were drawing trees on the local election ballots. In this case, the Conservatives lost their council majority to Labour, and the politics of street trees was brought into focus again.
It is here that the intersection of city centre redevelopment and the existential impact of the climate emergency becomes most toxic. Plymouth City Council defended their plans on the basis that Armada Way was ‘looking tired and past its best’ and that the scheme for which the trees were felled would ‘rescue, reinvigorate and renew the city centre and reunite a divided city.’ Digging through the STRAW and council websites revealed many similarities to what had played out in Sheffield: mainly a failure of meaningful public consultation and communication.
Street trees are highly visible in the urban environment, and although there may be much more carbon sequestered in woodland, soil or the sea, and even as landscape works represent just a fraction of the carbon emitted in building programmes, felling trees is rightly decried as entirely counterproductive as we face the climate emergency. Therefore, landscape architects, planners and managers need to be ahead of the curve in critiquing and demonstrating the necessity of retention, advocating felling and replacement only as the very last resort.
The sight of stumps, stacked branches, chipped timber, and the general wastage of arboreal life is visceral and powerful. Many words that we use to describe the management of trees are very corporeal, with the lopped and mutilated forms an affront to any ideas of peaceful coexistence. During the Sheffield protests, one of the cries was ‘Whose trees? Our trees!’, but what we would like to say to close this article is that we need a much deeper and more wide-ranging acknowledgement of what that question really provokes. We need to engage people with richer civics of the environment, in which a collective understanding of the value and needs of street trees is acknowledged. We need to invest in people as well as the environment so that a range of voices can be heard and, most importantly, we need to learn from our mistakes. This is something we attempted in the conclusion of The Politics of Street Trees, in which we set out the beginning of an inclusive charter for street trees, something that our profession and society seems to need more than ever.
On the 20 June 2023 Councillor Tom Hunt, Leader of Sheffield City Council, and Kate Josephs, Chief Executive of Sheffield City Council, issued an open apology, stating, ‘We recognise that this full apology, for some, is a long time coming, and we understand that due to the Council’s behaviour, some people will never forgive Sheffield City Council and have lost trust and faith in us. We hope that this apology will begin the process of restoring trust and faith.’ But it is fair to say that the process is still ongoing, with rebuttals made on the basis that Hunt and Josephs represent a new leadership group after those responsible for the street tree debacle resigned or left the council. Furthermore, the deep hurt and sense of injustice is still keenly felt, with the open apology dismissed as ‘meaningless’ by the former Green Councillor Alison Teal, herself one of the campaigners who faced egregious treatment in her efforts to challenge the former council’s actions.
So where does this leave us? In the case of Sheffield, we can only hope that the process of restoring trust and faith is manifested in the care for, and creation of, an ever-growing urban canopy that encompasses a wealth of public and private spaces. But this is not an endeavour that can rest just with the local authority, or any local authority for that matter.
In the words of Ira Bruce Nadel, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and Lesley R. Bohm, ‘the design, placement and maintenance of trees on city streets are the responsibility of everyone in the community’ and for that we need a broad civics of the environment in which everyone plays a part.
Dr Camilla Allen is Research Associate, Women of the Welfare Landscape at Liverpool School of Architecture
