ABSTRACT
Although the politics of street-trees has attracted a huge amount of public interest and scholarly attention in recent years, often been missing is the ability to step back from anxieties and anger surrounding specific incidents such as in Sheffield, in order to understand deeper drivers of concern and resistance. It is in exactly such context that this chapter explores how analysis of street tree protests can be located within a rapidly changing socio-political context. It achieves this through exploring three macro-political frameworks or themes (liquidity, (de)politicisation and austerity) and forging fresh connections focussed on street trees. Taken together we suggest these three frameworks facilitate the dissection of not just the complex interplay of variables underpinning protests but also why different actors in disputes often interpret the same issues or facts very differently. In short, this wider-lens perspective provides a way to see ‘the wood and the trees.’
