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Cities need more trees
11–20 of 169 posts
Re: Cities need more trees
#12Lots 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.
Or, as in Sheffield in the UK misaligned incentives: the company that was paid to manage the trees realised it was cheaper for them to cut them down, so started labelling trees as diseased that weren't.
Re: Cities need more trees
#13The 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.
Re: Cities need more trees
#14Does anyone have a "greenery index" of world cities?
Re: Cities need more trees
#15Lots 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.
Or, as in Sheffield in the UK misaligned incentives: the company that was paid to manage the trees realised it was cheaper for them to cut them down, so started labelling trees as diseased that weren't.
Privatisation gone wrong!
Re: Cities need more trees
#16I 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?
The tree just needs to be managed, the whole thing doesn't need to be cut down.
I'm in London on a tree lined street, every year they come and cut branches. If trees are rotten then they are cut (we have a lot of non-native trees).
In this bit of London there's a target to plant much more trees, so any cut down are replaced with a native tree.
Property developers are a different matter, I'm pretty sure the huge tree behind the flat I used to live in was illegally cut down; if the council had been aware it would probably have had a tree protection order put on it.
Re: Cities need more trees
#17The 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 th…
Huh? I've read multiple times that in the UK, private land can't be "fenced off" and the general public has the right to roam on it, as long as they aren't causing a nuisance or getting too close to peoples' homes. Is that only for pastures or something?
Re: Cities need more trees
#18> 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…
West Sydney was rural fields until it was developed during the later half of the 20th century
I’m fairly sure the issue stems from insanely dense urban packing with a refusal to develop almost anything other than single family homes
They try to maximise house size on small blocks leading to an almost impossible block to plant a tree on
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Also pointing out Greater Western Sydney is one of the worst urban places in the world for tree cover given the climate
I could never afford to live in Sydney, but my late father’s upbringing in the then “poor” North Sydney is starkly different to the quality of life available to the youth in “poor” areas of 21st century Sydney
Re: Cities need more trees
#19> 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…
I'd guess both. Rich places have the money and influence to improve their area, leading to increased property value, in a cycle.
Re: Cities need more trees
#20Trees 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.
Not in Europe though.