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Cities need more trees

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Re: Cities need more trees

#31

Post by obscurette »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #13

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 th…

I also happen to live in such area. It's nice, but there are also downsides – solar roofs for example don't make sense here.

Re: Cities need more trees

#32

Post by jurmous »

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...

Re: Cities need more trees

#33

Post by short_sells_poo »

obscurette wrote: post #31
short_sells_poo wrote: post #13

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 th…

I also happen to live in such area. It's nice, but there are also downsides – solar roofs for example don't make sense here.

That's fair criticism, but perhaps it'd be much more effective to have a few but large solar farms outside the city, no?

Re: Cities need more trees

#34

Post by nottorp »

self_awareness wrote: post #21
classified wrote: post #9

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.

> Anything that's not a car has no place in a city. Erm, I thought cities are for people, not for cars

Erm, I think HN could use a "+1, well done sarcasm" upvote.

Re: Cities need more trees

#36

Post by agumonkey »

yen223 wrote: post #8

> 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…

Mostly urban density ideas were incompatible with green space in the decades prior. The more you want to fit people to "lower" rent, the less you can allocate for grass or trees.

Re: Cities need more trees

#38

Post by AidenVennis »

huevosabio wrote: post #26

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…

Streetview shows this very nicely for Mexico City. I wonder if having so many trees in the city would make chopping down of few trees for some new public development less frowned upon by residents?

Re: Cities need more trees

#39

Post by rob74 »

have_faith wrote: post #24

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...

I'm also against chopping down trees - but sometimes tree protection turns into a pretext for NIMBYism, especially if it's against projects that are also good for the environment, such as public transport (felling 189 trees for a bus lane sounds like a lot, but if the trees shown in this photo https://proarbmagazine.com/controversial-sheffield-bus-lane-... are representative, those look more like shrubs)

Re: Cities need more trees

#40

Post by ffgjgf1 »

f6v wrote: post #20
classified wrote: post #9

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.

Not in Europe though.

Depends, people keep saying stuff about “Europe” as if it’s some single monolithic place.

In any case very few people live in old town houses built prior to the late 19th century (in those places have their own issues) and there was plenty of car centric development during the 1950s and subsequent decades.

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