Urban trees provide multiple benefits to cities and their residents – improved air quality, biodiversity and animal habitat, climate mediation, and so on. This is increasingly recognised in international and municipal environmental strategies.
Through multi-disciplinary research, this project will provide in-depth analysis of how people relate with urban trees and plants. It will help us understand how people are affected by urban trees, and by their governance. Findings will be used to inform urban sustainability programming.
We began our research with the City of Melbourne, and are now undertaking a multi-city study.
Project background
or, how the research came about
The initial phase of our research into people’s feelings, concerns, and valuations of urban trees was a partnership with the City of Melbourne. Research funding included a grant from the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute/School of Geography as well as a Melbourne Engagements Grant.
As part of its Urban Forest Strategy initiatives, the City of Melbourne (CoM) created a digital visualisation of the urban forest. The visualisation shows the location, species, and useful-life-expectancy of each tree managed by the CoM. In addition, the CoM assigned each tree an email. The aim was to allow members of the public to email the City if a tree needed maintenance of some kind — watering, limb removal, etc. Instead, people emailed the trees about all sorts of things.
This project was unique because no systematic analysis of the emails to Melbourne trees had occurred. Also, to date, no Australian or international study of urban trees employs multiple methods in quite the way this research does.
The second phase of our research together builds on the email-a-tree findings to explore how plants (especially trees) become controversial in three Australian cities. This research is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (Phillips, Atchison, Head). At the moment, we are undertaking fieldwork for this research.
Research approach
or, what we are doing
Our multi-disciplinary approach includes using a range of methods:
Qualitative
Using qualitative analysis, we are examining people’s feelings, concerns, and valuations. The analysis, whether of emails (phase 1) or of interviews and observations (phase 2), will offer in-depth accounts of how people value and engage with trees, enabling us to tell detailed stories of urban trees and people’s relations with them.
Quantitative
For the initial phase, quantitative analysis used statistical and GIS techniques to get a broader understanding of the sentiments, species, and spaces involved in the emails. This provided an overview of the data, allowing us to map some of the relationships, and highlight issues for further research.
Arts
The arts aspect of the email-a-tree research involved collaborations with artists to explore and respond to the emails, the involved trees, and the qualitative and quantitative analysis. The aim was to foster new ways of engaging with the data and with publics. This aim continues to inform the second phase of research.