Like many people, I have over the years read many iterations of future cities, utopian, dystopian, and all the strange shadings inbetween. Science fiction brings them, but so do books about city planning, old consultation documents, proposals and all the other attempts we make to put a constructable pattern on the future. Trees and the city, in all their many patterns.
At the moment there's a lot of attention being paid to non-bounded cities. On one side we have the greening of the city: trees and shrubs entering the cities like long green chains along waterways and verges, along garden-chains, green edge alleyways house fronts and backs, with its attendant benefits of air cooling and freshening. Trees cool spaces, not least because in order to have a tree in the first place, you need things like adequate space, suitable surfaces, a decent water supply. But trees also fight, with utilities, boundaries, smooth surfaces. They buckle the plazas and make pavements swell, unnervingly. Maximum cooling for minimum disruption is the aim, but the tree is an entity in itself, and whether it sprawls out of control or sullenly declines is not altogether in the planter's control.
On the other we have the continent spanning imaginary megacity, a glass and steel wall of hyperconnected futurecity that puts human first, the continuous city of Neom, slicing through the desert. There's a nervousness around this, but the natural world washes around the new environment, growing novel bacterias around sewage outflows, hardy mosses on reservoir overflows. It may not be wildlife documentary-style, but it's wildlife nevertheless.
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