Holding ground: Trees as sites of urban resistance across London and Belfast

Across urban landscapes shaped by austerity, redevelopment, and dispossession, trees play key roles in practices of resistance, embodying continuity, rootedness, and contested attachments between people and place. Drawing on ethnographic research in working-class housing estates in West London and Belfast, this paper examines how trees operate as material and symbolic anchors for residents confronting displacement amid prolonged economic decline in the UK. Despite distinct historical trajectories, both sites reveal how residents mobilise trees and practices of care to claim spaces otherwise targeted for extraction and erasure. In West London, Mayanka explores a council estate where residents plant and nurture trees to challenge official claims of ‘uninhabitability' used to legitimise demolition and emptiness. In Belfast, Anna examines a ‘fairy tree’ – a culturally significant hawthorn that has withstood redevelopment pressures – alongside more contentious practices of place-making, including the burning of wooden pallets in Twelfth of July bonfires. Together, these cases foreground how care for trees is neither politically neutral nor uniformly benign, but embedded within antagonistic social relations shaped by class and colonial histories. Written in the shadow of the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the paper engages with scholarship on olive trees as sites of resistance to settler colonial violence, using this comparative lens to unsettle liberal paradigms of care that render it apolitical. Focusing on the material qualities of trees – their durability, flammability, rootedness, and vulnerability – we analyse how care can operate as a form of refusal, attachment, and contestation within, rather than outside, capitalist relations. By attending to practices that may involve harm, recklessness, or violence, we challenge romanticised accounts of care and urban nature, presenting them instead as contested terrains of material struggle, political antagonism, and uneven survival.