Have you read Persons Unknown: the Battle for Sheffield’s Street Trees published by Wrecking Ball Press? I’d recommend it. It’s a fascinating, bruising, depressing, elating, shocking account of the direct action that campaigners took against Sheffield City Council’s misguided decisions to fell healthy trees.
A resulting streetscape after tree removal.
It outlines what happened when residents got wind of the effects of the contract that the council signed with Amey to manage the city’s street trees…and how it degenerated into demonstrations, detentions and distrust. The book shows how, on some streets, it was a really difficult, ugly and controversial time. Neighbours who were once friends no longer spoke, such was the depth of feeling that the felling of street trees provoked.
Some say that this is what has now forced the Council to change how it operates. We now have a new decision-making process in the city that Sheffielders voted for which is based on committees rather than the small, executive group who had made the decisions. The book doesn’t go into it, but big changes have happened – and the street trees are managed in a very different way now.
Making space for trees in New Earswick, York.
The Sheffield Street Tree Partnership has created a strategy which involved extensive public consultation. The strategy is borne out of the collective aim of rebuilding public trust and confidence in the council and based on the approach of retaining street trees where possible, by making “decisions about the removal and replacement of trees on a case-by-case basis” (p.11).
We think the strategy is groundbreaking and a clear example of where we can learn from how NOT to do something! We often focus only on what works well, on the best practice, which means we can’t learn from our mistakes. As Matthew Syed suggests in his book, Black Box Thinking, we have to be open and honest about failures to be able to make improvements.
Ellie Hughes putting up questionnaire posters in Darnall
In the place-keeping research that we do, a lot of our learning is from what does not go well, of the ‘failures’ – or I prefer to think of it as ‘the what could work better’. We explore these themes in student projects and are currently working with the Street Tree Partnership to find out what people in Darnall in Sheffield think about street trees. Because the Partnership will not go into a neighbourhood and plant trees without discussing it first with residents. Undergraduate researcher, Ellie Hughes, conducted a short online questionnaire for residents living in and around Darnall in Sheffield. The questionnaire used photo-montages/ visualisations to help residents imagine what streets might look like with more trees. This is not something that the council or the partnership has the capacity to ask people, and Ellie is really interested to see if it helps people think about trees in their streets. The survey is now closed and we will be reporting the findings soon!