Urban forest

Urban Forest in Beirut, Lebanon, next to the Bakaa Valley.

The urban Plane Tree (Platanus) is a hybrid of the European (Platanus Orientalis) and the American (Platanus Occidentalis) trees. Its origins are shrouded in mystery. The main rumor/theory is that it was created by the Spanish botanical team of the royal garden of Aranjuez in Madrid around 1650, and that is why it is called Platanus Hispanica and this Spanish garden that houses these trees was classified as world heritage by the UNESCO. Its resistance to pollution and pruning made this tree the perfect city tree. It could also be considered a bio-art work of the Anthropocene, as it contributes for a solution, built by men and trees, to regulate the climate, or to avoid heat

In the frame of "Alter(action)" Olga Kisseleva proposed to connect these plane trees to her artwork: the communicative and connected Plane tree conserved in the National Museum of Modern Art in Poland. This installation is a new kind of organic network based on vegetal medium, which transforms encrypted communication.

Mugumo is a sacred tree of the Gikuyu people in Kenya. It is a type of a fig tree widely occurring in Eastern Africa and most common in the uplands. As a revered tree the most outstanding specimen of the mugumo have been protected by communities for centuries. Even in the urban contexts mugumo were not felled and grew to dominate and organize the environment below them. One of the most beloved mugumo trees in downtown Nairobi was to be felled in the course of the construction of an elevated highway. An uproar over this impending loss and coordinated environmental effort resulted in the President of Kenya sparing the tree and decreeing the construction to bypass the beloved tree, urban infrastructure changed the context and the spatial organization around the Mugumo tree. The tree has been dwarfed by the huge concrete pillars supporting the highway. From an anchor for an urban neighborhood, an epicenter of trade bustling in its shade, the tree has become a lonely middle sized (in comparative terms) dusty lonely witness to the endless construction. Human intervention, even a well-intentioned one may not be enough to counterbalance the effects of brutalizing urbanization. The most powerful actors in the hierarchy are incapable of saving the culturally and spiritually important places from their own environmentally destructive actions. Communication between the tree and the human is broken.