Becoming Tree

From interspecies attention to public policy

This session is part of the Public Vitality Camp 2026 and is developed with Mark Charlton, Professor and Associate Director of Sustainable Development at De Montfort University (DMU), Leicester, UK, together with his multidisciplinary student group and nextlearning e.V.

Urban trees are often governed as individual assets, maintenance costs or ecosystem services. Yet each tree is also part of relationships between soil, water, heat, habitat, health, memory, care and public finance – relationships that unfold across very different timescales.

What changes in public decision-making when an urban tree is encountered as a living relation and form of public infrastructure rather than as a single object or cost?

In this learning journey, participants follow distinct tree-related lenses through the Camp, noticing what each perspective reveals; and what it obscures. They then bring these partial accounts into a shared relational map and identify a public decision for further inquiry. Over the following 100 days, the group explores how these insights can enter an evidence-informed policy brief without losing the complexity that made them visible.

Welcome perspectives

The working language of this session is English, with openness to contributions in German. We particularly welcome perspectives from:

urban ecology, forestry and biodiversity

climate adaptation and urban heat

urban planning and public space

public policy and administration

public finance and ecological valuation

more-than-human and participatory design

local and community knowledge

No prior experience with interspecies or more-than-human approaches is required. Particularly valuable are perspectives that can help distinguish situated observation, ecological knowledge, public value and institutional decision-making.

Important notes

The Camp format is a volunteer-developed prototype and intentionally simple in how it is organised. Please bring your own food and drinks, and feel free to bring something to share.

Please register as well for the walk up and walk down from S Heerstraße to Teufelsberg of this day. So you can participate in the held structure of the camp, we can tune in together and cross pollinate across the sessions.

The Public Vitality Camp is a shared learning space for people already working on societal, institutional, technological and ecological challenges. Across the sessions, we work on concrete questions and tensions and explore what enables people, institutions and communities to remain capable of acting under increasingly difficult conditions – and how decisions made today expand or constrain future possibilities.

Here you can discover further sessions and register or apply to participate.