ABSTRACT
From 2014–2020, the City of Sheffield in England was embroiled in a bitter battle between its local government and citizens over the felling of 5,474 healthy urban street trees within the city limits. The successful community campaign generated new local and national government policy guidelines on urban tree management. This first-hand account by an activist/researcher in the community campaign to defend the trees explores the key human and non-human actors which have defined the agency of the community and the authority in determining their desired outcomes. As non-human actors, people’s homes, cars, gardens and streets provided safe boundaries for observation and intervention, with the doors, windows, gardens, walls, fencing and trees themselves, affording lines of defence. At the same time, vans, barriers, metal fencing, cameras and other entities acting in the interest of the local authority defined other intersecting physical boundaries. The roles these entities play changed according to the human actors involved, the actions taking place, and the boundaries they defined. The transgression of these boundaries is explored and interpreted to generate a deeper understanding of the spatial process and agency of communities contesting public space and property and the evolution of effective collective ecological urban action.
