Street Trees and Their City: Rethinking Tree Practices for the Fluctuating City of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Abstract

Street trees are a crucial part of urban landscapes. Yet as we expect street trees to perform both as living natural systems and urban infrastructure, treatments of street trees are often contradicting as the roles of tree care transfer across commercial nursery practices and local tree care practices by governments, private organizations or local communities. With current discussions and practices for street trees scattered or segmented, this project calls for a data-driven approach that will allow us to view street trees as one systematic and vivid entity.

The project is situated in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana in the USA, a city that is facing issues of subsidence, hurricanes, and rising sea levels. With an urgent need to consider the future of both the urban trees and the city, as well as measured and recorded incidents of change and shock in the landscape, New Orleans provides a rich platform for observation, analysis, and speculation. Geo-spatial data mapping is utilized in parallel with human scaled studies with the aim of developing a discussion towards understanding and designing of street trees in a manner that stretches across individual instances and city-scale tree networks. Similarly, it is important for the work to address projected changes in time. From this approach, systematic and geo-spatial-data-based approach to urban tree planning is developed. The work results in a conceptual design solution that proposes a transition of tree care practices to become localized in the streets of the city, most critically a solution that allows us to shift street tree discussions and decision-making processes from individual trees to urban forests to better anticipate for urban street tree resilience.

Keywords

Street Trees / Sustainability Management / Infrastructure / Geo-Spatial Data / Climate Resilience

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2023 Higher Education Press