Urban forests, trees and greenspace are critical in contemporary planning and development of the city. Their study is not only a question of the growth and conservation of green spaces, but also has social, cultural and psychological dimensions. This book brings a perspective of political ecology to the complexities of urban trees and forests through three themes: human agency in urban forests and greenspace; arboreal and greenspace agency in the urban landscape; and actions and interventions in the urban forest.

Contributors include leading authorities from North America and Europe from a range of disciplines, including forestry, ecology, geography, landscape design, municipal planning, environmental policy and environmental history.

1. Introduction

L. Anders Sandberg, Adrina Bardekjian, and Sadia Butt

Part 1: Human Agency in Urban Forests and Greenspace

2. Urban Forests are Social Natures: Markets, Race, Class, and Gender in Relation to (Un)just Urban Environments

Harold Perkins

3. From Government to Governance: Contribution to the Political Ecology of Urban Forestry

Cecil C. Konijnendijk van den Bosch

4. A Genealogy of Urban Forest Discourse in Flanders, Belgium

Ann Van Herzele

5. Institutions, Law, and the Political Ecology of Urban Forestry: A Comparative Approach

Blake Hudson

6. Manufacturing Green Consensus: Urban Green Governance in Singapore

Natalie Gulsrud and Can Seng Ooi

7. The Places of Trees in Honduras: Contributions of Public Spaces and Smallholders

Joby Bass

Part 2: Arboreal and Greenspace Agency in the Urban Landscape

8. (Urban) Places of Trees: Affective Embodiment, Identity and Materiality

Owain Jones

9. Order and Disorder in the Urban Forest: A Foucauldian-Latourian Perspective

Irus Braverman

10. High and Low, West and East: Four Arboricultures of the Tokyo Metropolis

Jay Bolthouse

11. The Unruly Tree: Stories from the Archives

Joanna Dean

12. Seeking Citizenship: The Norway Maple in Canada

Brendon Larson

13. Queering the Urban Forest: The Ecological Ethics and Politics of Arboreal Entanglement

Darren Patrick

14. The Thin End of the Green Wedge: Berlin’s Planned and Unplanned Urban Landscapes

Cynthia Hammond

Part 3: Actions and Interventions in the Urban Forest

15. "A Few Trees" in Gezi Park: Resisting the Spatial Politics of Neoliberalism in Turkey

Bengi Akbulut

16. Constructing New York City’s Urban Forest: The Politics and Governance of the MillionTreesNYC Campaign

Lindsay Campbell

17. Promoting Green Space in Cape Town, South Africa: The Role of the African Centre for Cities

Pippin Anderson

18. Cultivating Citizen Stewards: Lessons from Formal and Non-formal Educators

Greg Smith

19. Learning and Acting through Participatory Landscape Planning: The Case of the Bräkne River Valley, Sweden

Helena Mellqvist and Roland Gustavsson

20. A Step, A Stitch, A Sense of Self: Woods Walking as an Artist’s Path to Creating Identity

Kathleen Vaughan