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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I’m thinking if it would be better to make sidewalks as boardwalks offset from the ground just a foot or so. Obviously in places where it’s possible, which is far from everywhere.
It’s hardly surprising that the roots will break through concrete or tiled pavements, so the question is really why we prioritise the concrete over the tree. Maintaining a boardwalk does seem more expensive at a first glance, but a concrete sidewalk isn’t maintenance free either. It just appears to be for a while, but eventually the trees and other plants will break through and frost will cause it to break it down too. A concrete sidewalk still only lasts 10-20 years in good conditions, and even shorter in places with frost or trees etc. I’ve seen perfectly fine concrete break down in less than 5 years.
Anyway, my point is that I believe it would make perfect sense to use other materials for sidewalks. Materials that would be better to coexist with plants and trees or be easier to modify to tree trunks and whatnot…
Overall I think proper sidewalks design is generally a completely underappreciated discipline. I miss the desirepath subreddit. There are soo many things that could easily be done better.
Paving stones/cobbles seem to work much better than concrete and asphalt. They are very durable (stone), can be put down in different patterns, and if you need to do maintenance on underground stuff you can just rip them up and then replace the same stones when you’re done. They also appear to be more frost stable.
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”.
Sidewalks will always be a mere afterthought if the people designing the streets drive their car everywhere.