Arboles Urbanos is an investigative and creative response to living in downtown Puebla, Mexico. Within the urban core, a debate rages over urban forestry. Slowly, unequivocally, urban trees are being removed or denied care. In some cases, homeowners or business owners care for the trees, pruning, watering, and painting the trunks to avoid insect infections. People within most colonias (communities within the central urban area) assume, predictably, that this is the city's responsibility. Utility companies demand that trees are regularly pollarded, which is a threat to their survival. The city bus company wants trees trimmed as the streets are one-way, narrow, and the buses need a clear path. Many trees are rugularly assaulted and do not survive, and the vesitge trunks are silent memorials to the ravages of confusing jurisdictional authority. Those trees that survive are symbols or hope, of shade, of color, of living gracefully within concrete and rock streets and buildings.
This project arose after three months of research: Peter Goin catalogued nearly four square miles of the urban core, encompassed by the streets 11 Sur and 11 Norte (to the west), and 20 Poniente and 20 Oriente (to the north), 25 Poniente and 25 Oriente (to the south), and 10 Sur and 10 Norte (to the east). This is cartographically the Centro Histórico for Puebla. While many of these areas are already depleted of trees, there are sufficient examples to develop a representative selection for the Suite of Twenty-six.