Europe has a long history of urbanisation, with the first cities dating back some 8,000 years. While the formal means of decision-making (if any) used to shape the form of these settlements are lost in the mists of time, it is highly likely that from the earliest times some form of control was enacted on where and how people could build. Inadvertent controls would certainly have di…
In Betty Smith’s description of the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), also known as the “ghetto palm,” the tree is contrasted with the memory of a school poem that evoked the “forest primeval” with its “murmuring pines and hemlocks.” For Smith, writing in the early 1940s, the presence of this tree was a marker, or even harbinger, of neighbourhood decline. The tree of heaven se…