Tree Walk

31 Aug 2023 6-8.30pm

Credit: Courtesy of the Alternative School of Economics

Overview

Tree Walk is a walk around Thamesmead with group discussion about politics, economics and our connection to street trees with Camilla Allen, co-author of The Politics of Street Trees and The Alternative School of Economics.  The walk will start at TACO! and take in a number of trees and in Thamesmead, considering their role and use, the politics and structures around them, and our relationship to them. The group will then return to TACO! for food, drink and discussion. 

Tree Walk is the second public event of Tree Time, an ongoing research project by  The Alternative School of Economics that has been commissioned by TACO! Tree Timeexplores the relationship of trees with our expansive notions of time as a useful tool for thinking about and understanding our connection with the natural environment, ecological complexity, and imagining the future.

The project looks at the value ascribed to both trees in the context of an urgent climate crisis; the role of financial capitalism, green economies and neoliberal life in contributing to or mitigating climate change. It will also uses scientific analysis of a particular tree/s as a way to investigate the local ecosystem it supports.

The Alternative School of Economics are undertaking activity around Thamesmead including walks, reading groups, screenings, talks and workshops that engage local people in a conversation about ecology and place.  Outcomes from this learning together will be shared to a wider public through events, radio broadcasts and publications.

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Camilla Allen is a landscape architect and environmental historian based in Sheffield. She is the author of The Politics of Street Trees which focuses on the politics of street trees and the institutions, actors and processes that govern their planning, planting and maintenance. Her research focuses upon the relationship we have with the natural world. 

The Alternative School of Economics is a collaboration between artists Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck, formed in 2012. They make art that questions economic doctrine and knowledge hierarchies. Working and collaborating with communities, they explore global political issues in relation to the complexity of lived experience. Using feminist and alternative economics and pedagogies as forms of resistance, they produce film, graphics, photography, texts and clothing, as forms of activation, dissemination and reflection, shared to publics in art and non-art contexts. Recent projects include Artists’ Economies, UKS, Oslo, The End of the Present, Arts Catalyst, London & Sheffield, and True Currency: About Feminist Economics, Gasworks, London.

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