2007 was a difficult year for the image of Alberto Ruiz Gallardón. The mayor of Madrid was running for his first re-election and a citizen protest seemed to overshadow the possibility of renewing his absolute majority. The reason was the massive felling of trees that the PP councilor was carrying out throughout the city to make way for his pharaonic works and which reached its peak on the Paseo del Prado, where Baroness Thyssen led the demonstrations and threatened to be chained to a tree if the City Council tried to run the chainsaw through the trunks in front of her museum.
Coinciding with these demonstrations that labeled him a “tree killer”, and to demonstrate all that the Madrid City Council was doing to maintain its green heritage, Gallardón tasked his team with developing a computer program to launch a website that would gather all the trees lined up in Madrid (those that grow in the streets, not counting the parks or the Monte del Pardo), estimated at that time at almost 300,000 specimens. He called the page A tree pit, a tree. In reality, it was an application that looked like a map viewer that allowed you to see quite intuitively where each tree in the capital was, its species, the perimeter of the trunk, its age or height. Thanks to this, the people of Madrid could also inform the City Hall if a tree pit that should be full was empty and the environmental zone would proceed to replant it.
The application was launched in 2007 by the company Tecnigral and was awarded for its contribution to the public management of the municipal green space. At that time, the city council defined it as “an important tool for interaction with citizens that allows us to know the concerns of the capital’s residents regarding trees and to analyze one by one the suggestions and requests made to them,” explains the municipality in a press release.
A tree pit, a tree Many people have used it over the past 17 years to monitor the state of the city’s trees. In its first month and a half of activity alone, it received more than a thousand requests from citizens. But last summer, Madrid City Council decided to shut it down. Almeida’s team closed access to its website a few weeks ago, making it impossible to consult the data on trees that it offered.
“The application did not work,” explains a spokesperson for the Urban Planning, Environment and Mobility department, responsible for the website, justifying the closure. “Almost no functionality was operational,” which was due to the fact that they had not been developed by the city hall’s IT department. “We are working on an alternative,” he adds without giving a precise date for the return of this tool for transparency and municipal participation.
Similar design to Adopt a tree
As in Madrid, history repeats itself many times, the current mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has also been called an “arboricide” after several controversial fellings such as those of the Plaza del Carmen, those of Santa Ana or those associated with the Extension of Metro Line 11. It is common to see him represented in caricatures accompanied by an axe in his hand and his mask has become popular during the protests that are once again arising in the neighborhoods due to the announcement of new forest fellings for construction.
Like Gallardón, Almeida has launched several initiatives to demonstrate that his City Hall also cares for the city’s trees. The most notable of these was the promise to plant 500,000 specimens throughout the municipal territory during his second term, a figure that is still far away. He also presents as an achievement the fact that the capital is named each year “World City of Trees”, a distinction granted by a United Nations agency to 200 localities for having an organizational structure in charge of trees, a census of specimens and the holding of an annual event that recalls its importance.
In addition to the photos of Almeida planting trees – a common image for any city councilor – the first mayor launched a few months ago a proposal related to trees, of a more emotional nature. It is the Adopt a Tree campaign, a website on which the City Council draws all the trees in the city and encourages the people of Madrid to associate the names of the city’s newborns with each of them.
The initiative is purely symbolic, since it is not intended to have a physical reflection in the streets of the capital (another mayor of Madrid, Rodríguez Sahagún, has placed plaques with children’s names in many new plantations). However, the City Council sends the family a certificate signed by the mayor, which includes the name and date of birth of the minor, the species of tree adopted, the neighborhood and district to which it belongs, as well as the coordinates of your exact location. The City Council specifies that “each of the trees adopted is part of the natural heritage of Madrid and the process will not give the godparents any rights over these specimens, beyond the family and close bond that is created with it and, by extension, with all the trees in the city.
This new site has some similarities with the one that has now disappeared. A tree pit, a tree. Both share the goal of highlighting the city’s green heritage. And the cartographic base of the new one is extremely similar to that of its predecessor, with a tree identification number, its location, its species and, in this case, the name of the adopter and the date of adoption. However, it lacks other key elements that its predecessor had, such as the size of the specimen or the years it lived in the city.
