CityReads│Seeing Trees

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SeeingTrees: How Our Relationships with Nature and City Change?

Seeing Trees explores the role that street trees have come to play in our cities.

Dumpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin. Yale University Press, 2019.

Sources: https://theconversation.com/not-so-long-ago-cities-were-starved-for-trees-109553

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300225785/seeing-trees

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/04/16/book-review-seeing-trees-a-history-of-street-trees-in-new-york-city-and-berlin-by-sonja-dumpelmann/

https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2019/03/12/rights-of-way/

July 2019 is probably (one of ) the hottest month in recorded history. If you are also staying in the city in this hot summer, why not join me Seeing Trees?

What role do street trees play in our cities?

Not only do trees improve the city's appearance, but they also mitigate the urban heat island effect — the tendency for dense cities to be hotter than surrounding areas. Studies have shown that trees reduce pollutants in the air, and even the mere sight of trees and the availability of green spaces in cities can decrease stress.

For centuries street trees have been valued for both their aesthetic and climatological functions, but it has been especially the latter that have driven people to action again and again. Street trees began to take firm root in the urban environment in the nineteenth century once their climatological and hygienic functions in cities had been recognized during the public health movement. Trees did more than provide shade, bind dust, and cleanse the air. They also produced life-saving oxygen and contributed to ozone production.

But as Sonja Dümpelmann, a landscape historian and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, shows in her new book, "Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin," trees weren't always a part of the urban landscape. It took a systematic, coordinated effort to get the first ones planted.

Seeing Trees by Sonja Dümpelmann unearths a detailed and complex vein of urban history that “offers insights into how our relationships with both nature and the city have changed over time.” The collection of illustrated essays, divided into sections on New York and Berlin, is “about street trees’ literal and figurative entanglement not only in the built urban structure but also in the urban social, cultural, and political life as a whole.” Seeing Trees delves into the local politics, social struggles and everyday conversations surrounding trees in the newly-built environments of two rapidly expanding cities of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The many photos, figures, maps, paintings and historical records of street trees throughout the book provide a rich depiction of the scientific development and aesthetic impact of the tree planting movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Seeing Trees is structured in two parts with the first four chapters centred around New York City and the latter four focused on Berlin. Each chapter explores a certain time and place in the development of street trees with notable attention on a specific social, political and cultural context shaping the city’s urban forest. Urban forestry itself is a scientific, technological phenomenon. Techniques which include planting, pruning, shaping and hybridizing species have been used in the service of modernity, essentially taming the natural world to fit our modern lifestyles. The conflicts outlined in the book are as much about the roles of trees in everyday life as they are the shifting role of technology.

From a Science, Technology and Society (STS) perspective, the New York chapters contain valuable insights on how Taylorism and the Technological Revolution shaped arborists’ appeals to the rational-scientific nature of tree selection and ‘efficient’ street planning, with positive and negative effects for the health of trees and residents alike. 

The Berlin chapters focus on the social context of rebuilding post-war Berlin and the differing approaches of urban planning in East and West Berlin during the Cold War, with a close look at how political ideologies shaped both tree management practices specifically, and indeed the approach to the city itself more generally. 

Hajo Schüler’s posters advocated for street trees in the 1980s. 

Image courtesy Studienarchiv Umweltgeschichte, Neubrandenburg.

Once upon a time, city was hot, congested – and treeless

As New York City's population exploded in the 19th century, poor sanitary conditions, overcrowding, and hot summers made the city a petri dish for disease: Between 1832 and 1866, cholera outbreaks alone had killed an estimated 12,230 people.

By the turn of the 20th century, living conditions had deteriorated. Neighborhoods continued to be overcrowded, indoor plumbing was still lacking, and open sewers could still be found along many of the city's dusty streets and alleys.

By the turn of the century, the city’s congested streets could be choked with people, but without a green leaf in sight.  Library of Congress

Trees could be entirely absent from a neighborhood. The few trees that did line city streets – mostly ailanthus, elms and buttonwoods – could be individually cataloged with relatively little effort. For example, in 1910, The New York Times reported on the decreasing number of trees along Fifth Avenue. The article noted that between 14th Street and 59th Street, there were only seven trees on the west side and six on the east side of the avenue.

Real estate development, subway expansion and utility line construction had clearly taken their toll.

A physician proposes a solution

In the 1870s, eminent New York City physician Stephen Smith spearheaded a movement to plant more trees. Doing so, he argued, would save lives.

Physician and public health advocate Stephen Smith.  Wikisource

Smith, who pioneered the city’s sanitary reforms and founded the Metropolitan Board of Health, was the author of a groundbreaking study that correlated high temperatures with childhood deaths from a number of infectious diseases. He concluded that planting street trees could mitigate oppressive heat and save 3,000 to 5,000 lives per year.

To promote street tree planting in his city, Smith drew attention to what became known as the Washington Elm study.

Attributed to Harvard College mathematics professor Benjamin Peirce, the study claimed that the famous Washington Elm standing on the Cambridge Common in Massachusetts had an estimated crop of 7 million leaves that, if laid out next to each other, would cover a surface of 5 acres. The study illustrated the vast potential of a single tree’s foliage to absorb carbon dioxide, emit oxygen and provide shade.

In 1873, Smith drafted and introduced his first bill to the New York state legislature for the establishment of a Bureau of Forestry, which would promote the cultivation of street trees.

But the bill stalled; it took several additional attempts and amendments before it was finally approved in 1902. Even then, it didn’t provide adequate funds for municipal street tree planting. So, in 1897, Smith joined a group of citizens who decided to take matters into their own hands. Calling themselves the Tree Planting Association, they helped homeowners plant trees in front of their residences. A few years later, they also established the Tenement Shade Tree Committee to plant trees along tenement blocks and in front of public schools.

The city encouraged residents living on a block to collaborate on planting decisions so that trees could be planted at regular intervals, providing even shade and a uniform aesthetic. Some species, like the Norway maple, were favored because of their tall trunks and their ability to grow in poor soil and withstand urban pollution.

For these early activists planting trees was a way to cool streets and buildings in the summer and beautify the city’s gritty urban landscape.

On the front lines of fighting climate change

Only later would scientists come to realize the enormous potential that urban trees besides entire forests held in mitigating the effects of climate change.

In 1958, Chauncey D. Leake, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, warned of the warming atmosphere in a well-received paper at the National Conference on Air Pollution. He pointed out that warming temperatures could cause the huge polar ice caps to melt, leading to sea-level rise. To lower levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he suggested planting 10 trees for every automobile and 100 for every truck.

Leake’s proposal was an early attempt at using tree planting to offset global warming. Since then – and particularly over the last two decades – methods that calculate the number of trees needed to offset carbon dioxide emissions have become more sophisticated. For this purpose scientists and foresters from the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California Davis developed iTree, a suite of software tools that help to determine a tree species’ ability to sequester carbon, reduce pollution and decrease storm water runoff in a particular ecosystem.

Trees, and specifically street trees, in our urban and suburban settings are living reminders of our interconnected lives with the environment, reminding us of the opportunities and challenges of taking local and global action for something greater than our individual selves. 

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