Abstract
Issues of sustainable development, liveable cities, green infrastructure, and urban ecosystem services currently receive attention from researchers and decision-makers. Furthermore, the benefits to public wellbeing and health of high quality open spaces and green areas are now undisputed (e.g. Simson, 2008; Booth, 2005, 2006). However, with increasing pressure on urban landscapes for competing uses like housing-development green-spaces are under threat. Furthermore, austerity-driven cuts to local authority budgets mean loss of core services and skills relating to open-space management and planning. Some local authorities such as Newcastle City Council are withdrawing all expenditure on parks and community spaces. With major challenges in providing good quality urban green-spaces, the loss of most local authority countryside management services from 2008 onwards, reflects bigger problems (see Rotherham, 2014, 2015 for example). Within this wider scenario has been the growing importance of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to deliver core environmental and green-space services in many urban areas. These have been seen as possible fixes for the current waves of austerity cuts and many local authorities such as Sheffield City Council have gone down this route. Nevertheless, real costs (financial and otherwise) of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) are now emerging (Syal, 2018). There are also issues of public access to information once contracts become ‘commercially sensitive’ and of profit-driven delivery of core ‘public benefit’ services. These changes threaten ‘local environmental democracy’ as part of a wider shift in democratic processes (Flinders, 2012, 2017). This paper examines wider issues of austerity-driven cuts to green-space services, of PFI projects, and of local environmental democracy. It takes the Sheffield street-trees initiative as an exemplar case-study to interrogate the broad concerns.
Highlights
In the context of long-term ‘austerity’ and severe cuts in local authority services, matters such as nature conservation, countryside management, tree and woodland management, and other local environmental services are under stress (e.g. Rotherham 2013, 2015; Johnston, 2017)
The paper raises a number of questions of which the following are central to our arguments: 1. Is there a conflict between evidence of environmental, economic, and social benefits associated with urban street-trees and the directions of national political policies and their local manifestations?
Its main argument is that combined economic austerity and political reform increase vulnerability of urban street-trees to irrational short-term incentives that overlook their wider value; 2) A case-study of ‘No Stump City’ which we argue, provides an almost perfect microcosm of the empirical manifestation of broader issues and themes discussed earlier
Summary
In the context of long-term ‘austerity’ and severe cuts in local authority services, matters such as nature conservation, countryside management, tree and woodland management, and other local environmental services are under stress (e.g. Rotherham 2013, 2015; Johnston, 2017). Following a rise in public anxiety, a meeting between one of the authors (Rotherham) and AMEY's street tree managers revealed that AMEY had signed the street-tree work as a peripheral element to the core highways-engineering element of the £2.4 billion contract They had no knowledge of existing City Council strategies or policies relating to trees, environment, nature conservation, or public engagement. In June 2018, the Secretary of State for Environment appointed a national ‘Tree Champion’ to stop the unnecessary felling of trees and boost planting rates, with the intention of ‘bring[ing] together mayors, city leaders and local government to prevent the unnecessary felling of street trees, while backing the introduction of a new duty for councils to properly consult communities before removing trees’ (see Laville, 2018) This case-study leads to consideration of the wider implications
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