And while this is one of the largest cities in America named after a tree, these days there are very few of the oaks left.

Thus began the fledgling campaign to "re-oak" Oakland, which started on a recent weekend when a team of volunteers planted an inaugural stand of 72 saplings of coast live oaks in plastic buckets in a West Oakland park.

"Names are a powerful way to think about a place," said Walter J. Hood, a landscape architect and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who lives and works in Oakland and came up with the idea of resurrecting the city's forgotten groves.

"If a landscape changes, your way of life changes," he said, "whether it's a freeway cut into a neighborhood or a new dense canopy of trees."

After planting the 72 trees, Mr. Hood and a group of students and others ceremoniously affixed an image of a historic Oakland map dotted with oaks to a chain-link fence in Lowell Park, where the new trees will incubate until they are large enough to transplant. Over the next five years, the plan is to donate the oaks to residents of West and East Oakland - neighborhoods in the city's flatlands, which are far less verdant than the more affluent Oakland hills. The seed money of $10,000 for these first trees came from the endowment of Mr. Hood's university chair at the College of Environmental Design.

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Ecocity World Summit 2015 Speaker Profile     

Walter Hood

Walter Hood is an Oakland, California USA-based designer, artist and educator. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's landscape architecture and environmental design department, which he chaired from 1998 to 2002. His studio practice, Hood Design, has been engaged in architectural commissions, urban design, art installations, and research since 1992.

Hood specializes in the urban civic realm. Within it, his work ranges from small community-based places to large-scale landscape commissions. His studio recently completed the Broad Museum Plaza in Los Angeles, the Coastlines Wilmington Trail public sculpture, a half-mile stretch of sandstone towersthat mark a western ridge in reference to the coastal bluffs of San Pedro, Site/Cite a community installed mile-long street painting project in OpaLocka, FL, a 1.1-megawatt photovoltaic array within the campus landscape at the University at Buffalo, the Powell Street Promenade in San Francisco;and the new Sculpture Terrace for the Jackson Museum of Wildlife Art in Wyoming. Hood Design was also responsible for the gardens and landscape of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed De Young Museum in San Francisco. Earlier projects located in Oakland, such as Lafayette Square and Splash Pad Park, are regarded as transformative designs for the field of landscape architecture.