Here's a better way for cities and towns to plant street trees. When they're given more space for their growing roots and trunks, they live longer, healthier lives and are more beneficial to our urban environment.
Too often, the trees are planted in very small sidewalk cutouts and are expected to grow as if they were in their preferred habitat. However, the urban environment is typically very stressful for street trees, and a small sidewalk square with compacted soil makes things much more difficult. Trees in small pits often struggle to spread their roots and therefore struggle to obtain much of the water, oxygen and nutrients that they need to survive.
Footage from this video was taken at the University of Pennsylvania, where new buildings have much more optimized spaces for tree to be planted along streets.
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Oh I agree, any plant is pretty much an afterthought in a lot of cities, while they should be an integral part. The situation in my city is actually a perfect example of that: they put absolutely no thought into what kind of tree they’re planting, how deep and where. They’re practically an “addition” to a street.
Trees are especially important for blazing summer days when they provide shade. Walking down that treeless street is hell.
But it wasn’t a sidewalk issue, the roots were like 20cm above the ground that was on the same level as the entrances to houses (the city is completely flat). And that’s a huge difference, infrastructure can be fixed in a couple of months, trees need decades to grow, which is why we need to be careful when selecting and planting. But alas, that’s not guaranteed at all as long as we view them as “a thing you plonk on a street and call it a day”.