Cambridge Urban Forest Master Plan

Healthy Forest Healthy City

To grow and sustain a resilient and equitably distributed urban forest for Cambridge, in the face of climate change, is the goal of this planning framework, created in collaboration with the city’s Urban Forest Task Force. The plan builds upon geospatial analysis, original research, and projective modeling to create a framework of strategies addressed to the city and the wider community. The plan is supported by a communications strategy to catalyze the partnerships necessary to realize a healthy future forest.

Revealing Data, Sharing Important Messages

An intensive analysis of geospatial data reveals the underlying causes of persistent canopy loss — the individual decisions of diverse private actors, including residents — and alters the dominant narrative about who is to blame.

Compelling and accessible maps also highlight the embedded inequity of canopy cover across the city, stemming in part from the history of redlining of the last century. Today, the city's most vulnerable residents live in the neighborhoods with the least canopy cover and the most intense hotspots. The project's messaging reframes the urban forest as a shared resource and an important part of urban infrastructure — cooling homes, managing stormwater, enhancing health and well-being.

Prioritizing Action

Recommendations are predicated on an understanding of the present existing conditions and changes in the city over the past decades, ranging from major property developments and to poor planting practices for new trees. Estimating threats such as increased temperatures, invasive insects, droughts, and floods, projection models target investment toward root causes of canopy loss and mitigation of future risks. The cooling effect of new tree canopy is modeled for several city-wide and neighborhood-scale scenarios, demonstrating urban canopy’s impact as green infrastructure.

New street design concepts, changes to city policy, including an enhanced Tree Protection Ordinance and a new Green Factor Zoning bylaw, and updates to the city's tree care practices support long term sustainable change. In parallel, we developed an urban soils management plan. Knowing that soils and moisture are the controlling factors in tree health and longevity, this plan will guide the city in bringing best practices to the care and enhancement of public trees through their living soils systems.

Public Engagement

Each month Reed Hilderbrand and our interdisciplinary team led public meetings with Cambridge’s 18-person Urban Forest Task Force. We shared assessments and interpretations of research. Together we set priorities based on real-world knowledge of the city and shaped a framework that defines a range of interventions spanning policy, practice, design, and outreach.

With 58% of the urban canopy on private property and 72% of canopy loss over the last 10 years on private residential lands, the active engagement of the private actors is necessary to grow the urban forest once again.

To inform, engage, and activate everyday residents Reed Hilderbrand developed a marketing and communications plan with a broad range of approaches to meeting the specific goals of the plan