Branching Out at the Future Treescapes Conference June 2024
The Branching Out team developed, led, and facilitated three 1.5 hour sessions at the last Future Treescapes Conference in Glasgow in June 2024. Our aim was to help participants develop their understanding of a hypothetical tree by utilising a range of tools, methods, data, and frameworks that Branching Out has developed and gathered. The range of elements that participants engaged with highlighted the different factors that could and should be considered when thinking about urban treescapes and decision-making. We focused on treescapes from the past in our first session, then treescapes from the present and finally from the future. Participants were assigned a tree (fruit tree, street tree or pocket park tree) and asked to think as that tree and then tasked with finding out some information on the tree from the team’s data dashboard such as its location and context and CAVAT value, exploring which stories from our citizen panel resonated with their tree and writing a short story to their past and future selves exploring how they were doing and who was interacting with them both humans and non-humans.
We asked for feedback from our 25 participants in the sessions and they added them to our tree poster. This word cloud provides a nice picture of how the approach and our work was seen as thought provoking and the sessions were fun, engaging and interesting.
Participants also talked about learning concerning how long oak trees can live for, they learnt about our project and the importance of people’s everyday stories of their relationships with treescapes. It also gave them insight into the importance of the cultural values of trees and connections between the past, present and future treescapes. Getting them to be a tree for the session meant that the trees voices were a priority and as one person said: ‘we need to act now to create treescapes of the future’.
Word cloud – words used to describe our session.
Comments attached to our tree
Participants engaging with our Branching out data in our Future Treescapes Conference sessions