Urban Trees Curb Violence, Study Contends

Georgette Benson’s eyes sparkled with amusement at one of the silliest things she ever heard--the idea that trees can reduce violence in the menacing public housing project where she has lived for eight years.

“There’s violence all up and down here whether there’s trees or not,” Benson, 31, said recently as she walked her two children along the bleak rows of high-rises at the Robert Taylor Homes. “See those balloons over there,” she said, pointing through a grove of trees. “A boy was killed there last week, shot in the head.”

But researchers at the University of Illinois say they have found a correlation between safety and trees, which appear to have a calming effect on city dwellers.

At tree-lined housing projects, children play more creatively, parents are more sociable and adults report dramatically fewer incidents of domestic violence, said the researchers, psychologist Frances Kuo and landscape architect William Sullivan.

They contend the mere presence of trees is beneficial.

“All kinds of things that are aesthetically nice have measurable and important effects on human behavior--heart rates improve, blood pressure goes down,” Kuo said.

The researchers, who studied residents at urban developments for four years, interviewed more than 200 women at the Taylor Homes. Some lived in buildings landscaped with trees, others in buildings barren of trees.

Asked if they had engaged in violence in the last year, 22% of the women from buildings barren of trees said they had. Among women from buildings with trees, 13% said they had.

Similar imbalances showed up in other questions. Asked if they had ever been in a conflict where they used a knife or gun, or threatened to, 11% of the women who did not live near trees said they had, compared with 3% of the women from tree-landscaped dwellings.

A companion study done by the same team at another housing project found that trees and grass foster more creative play among youngsters.

Urban forests are “as necessary as streets, sewers and electricity,” the researchers concluded.