Trees in Planters—A Case Study of Time-Related Aspects

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2021

Description & background This lesson is perfect to start with. It touches upon concepts as biodiversity, heat island effect. The students will start noticing different aged tree individuals. In addition, they will visit some of these old trees, get to know them and compete to complete the tasks. This lesson is especially useful as a beginning exercise for other tree related exercises Keywords Biodiversity, old tree, ecosystem services, heat island effect, urban pollutant, fine particulate Goals for student Develops understanding of importance of different age trees in the city. Builds the ability to notice trees as individual species in the city with specific benefits to human health. Gains understanding of trees functioning in the city; the different public bodies dealing with trees and green spaces; understanding that trees are vulnerable to people´s choices. Suitability Outdoors & indoorsspring, autumn, summer Fits in subjects Biology, geography, ethics, arts, social sciences What do you need? Materials: Urban Tree Bingo cards; printer and scissors, or alternatively smartphones Preparation: Print the Urban Tree Bingo cards. Decide what is the best way to work based on the situation of the group. Do the students use the Bingo during class in little groups? Do they use smartphones, or do they draw? This can also be a task to do at home. #1 Noticing trees in the city City of Trees | inspirational package #1 Setting the scene Unlike people, trees can grow to become as old as hundreds of years to even over a thousand of years old. But trees do not grow fast nor do they grow with all their organs intact. Trees recreate the materials they need for survival every year. Every year they produce seeds and their leaves are created every year, whether they are young or old. It is rare for a tree to die of old age alone. Instead, it is the exposure to the stress of wind, disease, insects, pollution, soil erosion, soil compaction, weather and people that will most likely cause its demise. City of Trees | Inspirational package The trees surrounding the city help to cool the city down. #1 Setting the scene These gentle giants have other special characteristics. Trees in the city sequester carbon, which refers to the long-term removal and capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This in turn slows or reverse atmospheric CO2 pollution and mitigates global warming. As a byproduct of this sequestering, they produce oxygen in the process called photosynthesis, which we humans need to exist on this planet. This process sustains life on the planet. City of Trees | Inspirational package Old trees in cities are very important. Large and old trees stock more carbon. A solitary tree gets to deal with harder circumstances to survive as well. #1 Setting the scene Younger forests have been found to be better at storing carbon. These plants can extract carbon from the air and incorporate it into their biomass more quickly than mature trees that must contend with more neighbors and less sunlight. Old trees are often (but not always) larger in size. Large trees are excellent filters for urban pollutants and fine particulates. Mature trees regulate water flow and play a key role in preventing floods and reducing the risk of natural disasters. A mature evergreen tree, for instance, can hold on to more than 15 000 liters of water per year. City of Trees | Inspirational package Many woodpeckers use dead trees to drill for food and to nest in cavities excavated in snags #1 Setting the scene Especially large, old trees also feed and shelter birds and small mammals. Many animals use mature trees for nesting, resting and for places from which to hunt. Even dead trees are useful for e.g., woodpeckers who use dead trees to drill for food and to nest in cavities. Salamanders use rotting logs or stumps as both shelters and food sources. Without big, long-lived trees, these animals could die. Young trees have fewer dead branches and flowers, and less nectar, peeling bark and woody debris compared with large, established trees. It can take more than 200 years for tree hollows to form naturally. Though old trees are vitally important to humans and the natural world alike, we keep losing old trees in the cities to make way for urban expansion. When we do not understand the importance of old large trees, we are keen to remove them for making way for younger trees and to be safe from material damage.

E3S web of conferences, 2022

Nature-based solutions (NBS) emphasize the importance of linking biodiversity conservation with climate-resilient and sustainable development plans. In the built environment, artificial ecosystems, such as vertical gardens (VG), cannot be considered NBS if factors such as biodiversity and sustainability are disregarded. This project demonstrates the workflow of incorporating the suitable plant composition in the process of designing a conceptual VG, in a case study in Athens, Greece, while additionally explores the vegetation influence in buildings' microclimate. Initially, the process relies on digitizing data pertaining to suitable native plant species along with their growth and maintenance parameters; this further enables the establishment of criteria for selecting plants for VG within the architectural proposal. In the second part, a conceptual design experiment of a VG is conducted, where the selected plant species are evaluated in terms of site-specific characteristics, before reflecting on the prospects of the process, in the third part. As a result, this work demonstrates a design approach that is extended to harness local plant capital for the benefit of urban biodiversity. In doing so, it promotes transdisciplinarity by merging different concepts into a coherent, valuable research set that is replicable and accessible to all.

2020

The present article deals with the aesthetical impact of trees and their relating importance for people in the urban context of open spaces. Indeed, trees therefore have ecological and climate compensating effects, but also social, individual importance, which is noted through the human perception of their spatial effect. Methodologically, this article is based on a literature analysis and sums up essential research results of the design and spatial impact of urban trees. Thereby, the results show that the importance of trees in the urban context and in their symbolical effect offers a reconnection to our phylogenetic heritage and fulfils our longing for the natural. The aesthetic appearance contributes essentially to the revaluation of the urban realm, but, furthermore, the health promoting impact on the human being is of particular significance.

2010

Architects are beginning to embrace the notion of landscape and,moreover, to acknowledge the conceptual scope of a dynamic and creative synthesis of ecology and materiality. In so doing, the conception that architects could not (or should not) draw a tree, is being consigned to the landfill site of antiquated practice. There is an increasing acceptance amongst planners, urban designers and governments that the greening of urbanity is necessary to, and indicative of, a viable, sustainable future. However, whether or not the traditional design rationale (modernism) delivers the necessary innovative outcomes is open to question. The visual homogenization of urban developments within our cities is symptomatic of both hackneyed design orthodoxies and a tokenistic approach to sustainable practice. Advocates of ‘landscape urbanism’ (Waldheim, et al 2006) offer a more progressive supposition for change, such as the use of natural processes to engender ecological diversity. However, in reali...

Environment-Behaviour Proceedings Journal, 2020

Green fabrics that comprise of roadside tree planting play a vital element in an urban ecosystem. Inappropriate roadside tree planting implementation and even during its post-execution of management practices affect streetscape quality of life (QOL). Roadside tree planting condition in every country and town in Malaysia tend to have different in quality as different authority conducts management and maintenance for different area. This study is to serve as a discussion of non-numerical data on the potential of attributes and approaches that can be executed in the Malaysian context.

The paper discusses co-design, development, production, application of TreeHugger (see Figure 1). The co-design among community and trans-disciplinary participants with different expertise required scope of media mix, switching between analogue, digital and back again. This involves different degrees of physical and digitaìGIGA-Mapping' (Sevaldson, 2011, 2015), `Grasshopper3d' (Davidson, 2017) scripting and mix of digital and analogue fabrication to address the real life world. The critical participation of this`Time-Based Design' (Sevaldson, 2004, 2005) process is the interaction of the prototype with eco-systemic agency of the adjacent environment-the eco-systemic performance. The TreeHugger is a responsive solid wood insect hotel, generating habitats and edible landscaping (Creasy, 2004) on biotope in city centre of Prague. To extend the impact, the code was uploaded for communities to download, local-specifically edit and apply worldwide. Thus, the fusion of discussed processes is multi-scaled and multi-layered, utilised in emerging design field: Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance.

METU JOURNAL OF THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

The design of green infrastructure in urban renewal sites is complex, requiring engagement with existing communities and future sustainable development goals, consideration of existing and future urban forms, changing climatic conditions, and the sites often being in low-lying and flood-prone areas. Traditional street tree decision-making approaches are inadequate for addressing the scale, environmental complexity, and mutability of decisions involved in urban renewal projects—new tree selection approaches that consider complex competing criteria for tree selections addressing stormwater management systems, visual assessment and solar amenity are needed. This paper describes a new method of multi-criteria street design decision modelling that combines outputs from hydrology modelling, digital procedural tree modelling and urban form analysis, with animation and gaming technologies. We evaluate our approach through application to the design of a large-scale, urban renewal project und...

Biomimetics

Redesigning and retrofitting cities so they become complex systems that create ecological and cultural–societal health through the provision of ecosystem services is of critical importance. Although a handful of methodologies and frameworks for considering how to design urban environments so that they provide ecosystem services have been proposed, their use is not widespread. A key barrier to their development has been identified as a lack of ecological knowledge about relationships between ecosystem services, which is then translated into the field of spatial design. In response, this paper examines recently published data concerning synergetic and conflicting relationships between ecosystem services from the field of ecology and then synthesises, translates, and illustrates this information for an architectural and urban design context. The intention of the diagrams created in this research is to enable designers and policy makers to make better decisions about how to effectively ...

2021

The traditional ecological and environmentalist thinking that theorised the 'return to nature' by contrasting cities and nature seems to be unable to remedy the destructive relationship between city and biosphere. For this reason, it is necessary to rethink the relationship between anthropised and biotic systems, in order to respect the objectives of the Paris Agreement. This rethinking process involves imagining a 'third space' with a positive environmental value, much like an intermediate landscape in which buildings and urban realities can be designed - in a backcasting process - as tools capable of incorporating different types of 'biospheric' capabilities. The essay investigates urban forestation technologies by evaluating their potential and long-term limitations in extreme climatic scenarios.

The studio project will investigate a special category of work that has useful implications for new directions in environmental thinking that is not strictly ecological. The idea is to focus on sociological and contextualism as well as orthodox green technology to address several expanded definitions of environmental reform. Fore example, using architecture and landscape architecture to recapture declining sections of the city and looking to the symbiotic fusion of buildings with landscape rather than the architecture being a formal counterpoint to landscape. At the grass roots level there needs to be a context-sensitive urbanism which responds to communities that need housing, community centres and quality-of-life urban spaces.

Asian journal of behavioural studies, 2020

Green and grey infrastructure plays a significant role in exposing the quality to the urban streetscape. The establishment and post-execution of streetscape planting management practice become a marking factor in measuring the sustainability of roadside tree planting. Due to the acceleration of the urbanization, conflicts in growing healthy roadside tree planting keep arising. Hence, this study is to deliver a discussion of nonnumerical data on the potential attributes and approaches that can be adopted and adapted in Malaysia for a better quality of streetscape tree planting practices.

Sustainable Urbanization, 2016

International research on sustainable architecture ascertained the responsibilities of urban forms for buildings' energy-environmental performances, highlighting the necessity to broaden the field of intervention in urban design. Furthermore, goals concerning the sustainable city increased design complexity, due to the involvement of different interrelated disciplines, which modified design processes by incorporating external contributions. In particular, environmental analyses are growing in importance and need to be reintegrated into the urban project at the conceptual stage. This 'environmental awareness' accompanies the history of the city, and numerous pieces of evidence clearly show the mutual and in-depth relationship between urban form and local microclimates. Lessons from the ancients constituted the fundamentals in urban design until the Modern Movement, during which knowledge of the past also influenced the work of G. Vinaccia, an Italian pioneer in microclimatic urban design. After the World War II, most of the lessons had been forgotten in favour of technology systems that have since revealed their failures. The current design condition requires a discovery of past abilities, coupling them with contemporary scientific advances. This work introduces a methodology through which to integrate current urban design processes with environmental data and analyses. It is illustrated through a case study and is supported by software.

1984

The 4'X4'X4' raised container (ree has been advocated as a quick, flexible, and inexpensive solution to tree planting beautification in the city. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of such containers to provide for both the physiological needs of the plant and the visual, functional, and aesthetic needs of urban design. A brief summary of the cultural problems of container trees in the midwest and north- eastern states is followed by a discussion of the effectual role of trees in urban design and the creation of successful urban spaces. The value of the beautification container in this capaci- ty is critically examined and alternatives to its use presented. Wherever possible, large shade trees planted at grade are suggested. Where conditions necessitate raised plantings, shade tree massings grouped in large planting beds are favored over the container. One of the products of the beautification move- ment of the 1960s was the free-standing con- tainer tree. The app...

Abstract Book of the 2015 European Forum on Urban Forestry in Brussels/Waterloo (Belgium)