The School of Emergent Priorities has released a display advertisement inviting the public to the University's research on what a street canopy costs to keep.
A new display advertisement puts the University's street-tree survival research on its landscape panels
A row of young trees along a kerb, each with a watering bag at its foot, now occupies the University’s landscape display panels. Here and there in the row a stake stands on its own.
The image belongs to Count the Trees Still Standing, a display advertisement convened by Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register, of the School of Emergent Priorities. It introduces the public to Dollars per Living Tree, a research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement that followed 386 street trees across 24 verge segments through two summers and costed their watering against the trees that survived.
A canopy is a long-dated entry. Somebody plants it, and somebody else is standing under it when the entry falls due. We thought the people waiting for the bus were well placed to consider that.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register
The campaign mobilises a single line of copy, a single sentence of explanation and an address, and anchors them to the published record: the advertisement carries the poster’s identifier in its small print and points to two further entries in the University’s repository. It has been prepared in light and dark renderings for the panels it will appear on.
The University sees in the campaign an expression of its continuing interest in being found by people who were not looking for it. Dr Okoro said the School “would be glad of the company of anyone who has ever wondered about a stake with nothing tied to it”.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3nfa49.