No stump city : the contestation and politics of urban street-trees – a case study of Sheffield

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.