TreesAI - Trees as Infrastructure

Participants

Chloe Treger (UK Lead, TreesAI)

Sara Heitlinger (City St George's, University of London)

Overview

Chloe will be talking about her experience leading the Trees-As Infrastructure (TreesAI) initiative. TreesAI is exploring what is needed to establish nature as a critical part of urban infrastructure alongside bridges, roads and rail, enabling investment, profitability and sustainability. Urban forests regulate several ecosystem processes (e.g. thermal comfort, increased cognitive performance, surface water flood mitigation etc.) - playing the role of infrastructure. TreesAI is working with various governmental, academic, technological, private and civic partners to explore how digital, design and financial innovation can support us to revalue urban nature from a liability to an asset collectively.

Chloe was Lead of Research & Analysis at Dark Matter Labs, and is now the TreesAI UK Lead. She is a partnership-driven designer focused on urban systems change at the intersection of our natural and financial worlds. With degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford and an MSc in Urban Planning and City Design from the UCL Bartlett School of Planning, at Dark Matter Labs she has built up a wide-ranging experience in strategic projects.

This is the first in a series of talks organised jointly by the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design in the School for Science and Technology, and the Mosaic project: More-than-Human Sustainable and Inclusive Smart Cities project, led by Dr Sara Heitlinger, on the topic of urban ecology and technology. The aim of this series of talks is to spur new ways of thinking and action across disciplines and sectors, amongst students and academics at City St George's in response to the environmental crises that we face.