Hug the Streets - Growing a Multifunctional Urban Tree-Parking Infrastructure, 2016

'Hug the Streets' proposed and prepared the ground for a transition from car to people-centred urban design and planning, by examining if and how multifunctional city-wide green infrastructures can make for more liveable streets. Using the symbolic power of trees as change agents - parking trees where cars are parked today, the project aimed to make streets more liveable. Tackling demographic and climatic challenges that Nordic cities will be facing in the coming decades, the project proposed green multifunctional infrastructure solutions. The project explored the possibilities and the value of integrating above and below ground systems for energy, water, and soft mobility, with natural ecosystems; proposed integrated concepts; and enabled relevant stakeholders to materialise the proposed solutions.

In order to tackle the complex and interrelated challenges to realise this idea, the project made use of an interdisciplinary and holistic, stakeholder-driven approach, combining perspectives from landscape architecture, engineering, participatory and sustainable design, political science, arboriculture and social anthropology. Concentrating on selected Norwegian cities, the project worked at three intertwined scales: the human, the street and the city scale. At the human scale, the project explored how to conceptualise urban infrastructures and map and involve the stakeholders that develop, maintain and use them in co-creating liveable streets. At the street scale, the project mapped practices and interests, conflicts and synergies, to identify opportunities for fostering change, and to develop and evaluate a portfolio of concepts for multifunctional green infrastructures. At the city scale, the project explored the value of a city-wide rollout of such infrastructures, and develop and equip stakeholders with the means for fostering the transition towards it.