Episode 05: The Street Tree Scientist: Why Urban Greening Keeps Falling Short
In conversation with Dr Thami Croeser, Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University
About the episode:
Australian cities have never had more urban forest strategies, yet many neighbourhoods keep getting hotter. Tree targets are missed, canopy inequality grows and delivery stays painfully slow. Why?
In episode 5 of Cities of Tomorrow, we talk with Dr Thami Croeser, Research Fellow at RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research. He argues the problem isn’t a lack of evidence. It’s the way cities make decisions.
Thami takes us from the treeless North Melbourne street that sparked his career, to the Green Your Laneway program that turned four Melbourne laneways green, to his global study testing the 3-30-300 rule across more than 2.5 million buildings. We talk about why engineering rules so often say no to trees, why the hottest suburbs have the least shade, what European cities are doing with nature-based solutions, and why he believes Melbourne needs an infrastructure-scale task force to plant trees at the pace our cities need.
Key topics:
- The street that started it all: a hot, treeless walk in North Melbourne, the “missing infrastructure” of nature, and why the real problem isn’t a lack of knowledge.
- Green Your Laneway: more than 800 community responses, four laneways transformed, and why the council’s own processes were the hardest part.
- The 3-30-300 rule: three trees in view, 30% canopy in your neighbourhood and a park within 300 metres, and what testing 2.5 million buildings revealed.
- Parking for parks: how up to half of central Melbourne’s street parking could fit in nearby garages, and why no one knew how to act on it.
- Engineers and trees: why green infrastructure needs to become core business for the people who hold the infrastructure budgets.
- Canopy inequality: why outer suburbs with black roofs and unshaded streets often have the least canopy and the most heat.
- Lessons from Europe: nature-based solutions in Valladolid, Liverpool and Izmir.
- 40% by 2040: whether Melbourne’s target is realistic, and what an urban forestry task force with real money and power could do.
About the guest:
Dr Thami Croeser is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University. His work sits at the intersection of urban planning, ecology, geospatial data and institutional reform, and focuses on how cities can deliver urban greening at the scale their own strategies promise.
Thami worked as a practitioner for around ten years before returning to study urban planning. At the City of Melbourne he helped run the Green Your Laneway program, mapping the potential of the central city’s laneways and working with local communities to transform Melbourne’s first four green laneways, including Guildford Lane and Meyers Place. He then joined RMIT to work on URBAN GreenUP, an EU Horizon 2020 project planning nature-based solutions with cities including Valladolid, Liverpool and Izmir, and completed his PhD at RMIT.
His research includes a 2022 study showing that up to half of the City of Melbourne’s street parking could be accommodated in garages within 200 metres, freeing that space for nature. His 2024 study in Nature Communications tested the 3-30-300 rule across more than 2.5 million buildings in eight global cities, and found that only 3% of buildings in Melbourne’s innermost suburbs had adequate neighbourhood canopy. The media campaign that followed reached an estimated 200 million people and earned him a research impact award.
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