 Hello everyone let's talk about urban planning again. Today let's look at urban forests and how they are implemented in cities around the world. So urban forests are gaining popularity as a solution for climate adaptation in urban planning but what does it really take to successfully implement a new urban forest project? This is why we have the help of our guest, Victor Munoz-Sans, is from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and we'll be exploring with Victor the planning processes of urban forest projects in three different cities in Almir, in Madrid and Boston. Victor it's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, same flag question. Before we jump into the article itself and your research what are urban forests? So tell us about the concept. Well, probably in Europe if one talks about urban forest to a layperson one can imagine a park which has lots of trees and that's kind of an urban forest and that indeed is one way of defining urban forest but in terms of a discipline of scientific discipline and urban forestry and urban forest is broader. It really talks about the official definition, talks about all the trees that are part of a city that are in a city and that's what is considered urban forest but with this article of course we also want to question that definition. Of course it's a good context of background for us to start so can you give us a bit of that background about this research in particular so why is this important? Yeah well we know temperatures are rising, biodiversity is being lost and greening has become kind of high in all the political agendas and we also know that green has multiple benefits, carbon capture they mitigate the heat island effect for example green improves public health so trees are important and indeed in Europe the European green deal is already asking cities to kind of to develop urban greening plants by 2030 so it has become a municipal task to develop greening plants. So as this greening and in the end the question of the urban forest becomes mainstream we basically wanted to know well how can we implement this with success and does the focus of our paper how do we make it in work how do we make it actually possible? Precisely that's where I want to follow up and correct me if I'm wrong so your research along with your authors so wants to point out good practices and success cases in urban forest strategies even though strategies like this have been implemented for years correct? Yeah so we are looking I mean we are looking at specifically at how there might be a mismatch between the processes that usually take place in city planning, city government and the principles of urban forest so and that comes to the course with the analyzing of the success of the other past projects. Specifically we looked at very recent projects what we call a new generation of urban forest because we thought there was like there could be keys to understand new trends and new ways of dealing with this question and so in our paper we have three main objectives one was really to understand how a city and different urban stakeholders as from the bottom could make a case for green in a project how to argue for the need of planting more trees. We also were interested how then these actors seek for support for the projects and to overcome there for the possible barriers for implementation and third we want to know what were the models both in terms of organization but also in terms of typology of a forest that were chosen in connection to those the goals of the projects and the different actors that were involved in them. Let's tell us about the findings then. Well in relation to the first aim so in this how different stakeholders make a case for green we indeed see that I mean among all these actors the main concern is environmental questions so the need for more ecosystem services in cities and they point that you know we have to effectively implement this into the city planning to mainstream things into city planning but we also show that there is a poor development of criteria that could allow to assess whether a project is successful or not so we miss that there is not enough benchmarks or in urban plan urban forest plans that could help different strategies and to support the adaptive management of the process how do you evaluate the process in the projects in time and adapting as you constantly assess them and then concerning the second research aim which is how different actors seek support we did notice that in order to kind of go beyond some of the different barriers that happen even within urban planning city municipalities actors seek support from different stakeholders mainly intermediaries from academia for example and also other agendas national international to the legitimized projects and and what was very important going to that is that indeed most of the barriers that were perceived by the different actors we interviewed were not really the ones that we could maybe at first think they are the ones that could hinder the implementation of a project of urban green for example you know the pressures of densification or urban development most of the barriers were internal they were about lack of information silos silo thinking it within the the municipal departments and continue it in time so as governments change election after election priorities change and we know that in order to to build a forest one needs to think in a long-term perspective 40 50 years and then finally in in relation to which models are being favored what we concluded is that it did we need to question the traditional scientific definition urban forest that i told before of the all the trees within a tree or within all the trees within the city because that that idea demands a lot of coordination within a city you know and not all cities have the resources to think in that scale of a normal forest so we need to think of different ways of also bringing green in our cities which could be also coming from the bottom up okay so the findings concerns stakeholders different actors models that are favored over others can or have these findings impact public policies somehow you refer to municipal planners in your article for example so can you elaborate on that yeah i think that what what we think is the strongest point of our results is that we have to consider a broader spectrum of possibilities and a diversity of ways of thinking about urban stories and that's very much depending on the context of environmental and social context so that there is not just one solution and to achieve the desired environmental goals and you know as a tone and also to overcome the different barriers so these results can be always support public policy in anticipating consequences in the media in the medium and long term of favoring a model for example if you choose to put down what a bottom up right in the middle model what we show can help to identify anticipate possible and problems or challenges you could have in the future for example you have a top down project it will be interesting to still implement some sort of like a collaborative structure that could reach the gap between the top and the bottom and also and there and that way activate you know local initiatives for example and involving citizens and businesses in the maintenance and future long term management of the of the forest to overcome this question of the long term management for the from the perspective of the municipality on the contrary when a bottom up approach and given that they are mostly based on and rely on on on personal leadership let's say somebody who decides that this should be done as a project that has challenges in terms of long term development because as soon as the leader goes then the project may may wear down so in this kind of approaches bottom up with advice that one is to find ways to make them institutional and to set other frameworks that could take the project beyond these personal initiatives. Of course and for researchers and planners that are working on urban forestry so where they should look now I'm curious to know about future venues for research. Well we feel that there's a need to go in depth to this question of organizational model and mostly because and also to understand how can we better assess the projects in time. So we hear regularly on the news and in both planning and urban design news and that cities are putting out of money planting trees but just after that we don't hear anything about that we don't know how the projects have been assessed as they've been monitored what can we learn from those initiatives. So what we feel is that we need to find ways of monitoring projects in a dynamic way so that one can learn from these practices and these best mistakes you know practices failures and therefore identify possible next practices of urban forestry. Of course we that has to do with some of the limitations we have in the in the study which is that we are focusing only in Europe and also America so we would be will find interesting to find insights from other geographies which could bring other alternative ways of thinking urban forestry and also we are based our analysis on interviews and collective studies so we will need to kind of have a larger sample and a quantity of approach to provide a richer for the waste cities based in the challenge of greening. Of course so there's there are some different methods that can be conducted other geographies and there's apparently an issue with follow-up and monitoring as you were saying. So what further materials can you share with who's listening about this topic? Well there's also a lot of things being written and can worry about about urban forestry if I can be so specific. Last year there was a very interesting conference in the Cal 11 which is called urban forest forestry which is basically the same team that wrote wrote these articles for urban planning, wrote a follow-up with a lot of case study and that so you can find that in my research profile. And also the proceedings of this conference are very interesting research for those interested in urban forestry because you can have an overview of their work that's in the specific type of light or view of the research of urban forest. Additionally dealing with the question of the barriers or the challenges for implementing the climate adaptive and mitigation policies. Recently I closed an article for urban planning which in the issue of planning and urban polarization which deals with also the question of how the public accepts as a participation in climate acceptance projects works, includes as a meeting. So to anticipate kind of how a project may have difficulties in being accepted and how to overcome that in the process. Of course all the materials to our listeners all the materials that Victor just suggested will also be available if you are watching on let's talk about urban planning website below the video of this conversation so you can find there all the recommended materials that Victor just just shared. So Victor let's close this episode with a punchline message, a grand finale. So if you could condense this conversation in two, three sentences what would you say? Well there is a serious need to take greening seriously that's the first thing and to consider that the time matters in addressing the challenge we have now in terms of climate. Time matters in terms of like we have to act urgently and time matters because these solutions take a while to start taking effect so we need to consider not just the act of implementing policies now but actually their long-term life and maintenance and management. So indeed we need to question to imagine new ways of organizing planning and to imagine new ways even of new institutions that could manage such projects in the long term. Thank you Victor. Thanks. If you are for our listeners if you are watching us on YouTube you can find all the resources all the materials of this conversation on the Let's Talk About Urban Planning website and you can also listen to these episodes wherever you get your podcast.