Services · Green spaces and tree care
Urban and residential green spaces
The greenery of a street, a square or a courtyard belongs to no one in particular. It belongs to those who pass under it, who live opposite it, who thirty years from now will need it to breathe more easily. Deciding about that greenery is a collective responsibility dressed up as a building management matter. The Studio takes it for what it is.
Do you want to stop chasing emergencies?
For public administrations, residential buildings, management organisations. Write to me describing the asset (approximate number of specimens, context, recurring problems): in the days that follow I will respond with an initial outline of approach and timescale.
Why a plan, not a series of interventions
Urban and residential green space almost always suffers from the same problem: it is managed reactively. A tree falls, so the one next to it gets checked. A resident’s complaint triggers a pruning. An assembly deadline prompts someone to request a quote. The result is a collection of disconnected interventions, each with its own in-the-moment logic, none of them speaking to what came before or after.
Planning green space means the opposite: reading an asset as a whole, understanding how long it has been accompanied, building a schedule of care with a horizon of years rather than seasons. It means deciding what to prune and what to let grow in its natural form. Deciding which specimens have reached the end of their manageable life and need to be guided towards replacement, and which are still vital and deserve prolonged care. Deciding where to replant, and with what species, in light of the climate we are already living through and the one we will have to navigate.
For public administrations this is called an Urban Green Plan (Piano del Verde, PdV). For larger private residential buildings it is the same thing, applied at a smaller scale. In both cases it is the document that makes it possible to stop chasing emergencies.
How I work
Inventory before prescription. No Urban Green Plan without first knowing what is there, where it is, and in what condition. Georeferenced mapping, descriptive parameters for each significant specimen, field photography, identification of any critical issues.
Reading the asset as a whole. Not the single tree as starting point, but the population: species distribution, age class distribution, recurring vulnerabilities, climatic and human pressures. This is where the strategic choices come from.
Care programming. No generic “maintenance” lists. For each homogeneous group within the asset, specific care choices with a multi-year horizon, a hierarchy of priorities, and reassessment criteria.
Accompanying heritage trees. Specimens of high value — landscape, historical, ornamental — deserve their own dedicated path, with focused monitoring and extended care. For these, the Studio’s rule is: do not remove if a dignified accompaniment alternative exists.
Being clear about costs and timescales. A serious Urban Green Plan costs more than a badly programmed pruning, but it costs less than the sequence of badly programmed prunings that follow in subsequent years. I say this plainly, with figures, before any agreement is signed.
What I deliver
For public administrations: a complete Urban Green Plan (inventory, species atlas, care guidelines, multi-year programming, green regulations if required). For residential buildings: an operational management document, a three-to-five year intervention calendar, records for high-value specimens. For individual trees: a monitoring record with a care schedule.
Frequently asked questions
“Green maintenance” or “green care” — does it make a difference?
It reflects a different underlying idea. Maintenance is what you do to a machine: you keep it in the state it was delivered. A tree, on the other hand, is a living being — it reacts, heals, ages. That is why I speak of care. The technical work is no less rigorous: it is more, because it starts from how a plant actually works.
Who looks after the green space in a residential building?
In practice it is a communal expense and the building manager arranges its execution, with the general meeting deciding the more significant interventions. My role is not administrative: I give the building manager a clear technical plan — what to do, when and why — so expenditure follows a logic rather than emergencies.
What is an Urban Green Plan and is it mandatory?
It is the document that programmes the care of a tree asset over a horizon of years: inventory, choices by specimen group, calendar, reassessment criteria. For municipalities it is an increasingly required instrument (and in many cases linked to green regulations); for larger residential buildings it is the same thing at a smaller scale. More than mandatory, it is what prevents emergency-chasing.
Is a tree inventory genuinely necessary?
Yes, it is the starting point: without knowing what is there, where it is and in what condition, every intervention is blind. Georeferenced inventory is the foundation on which everything else is built.
How often should the trees in a residential building be pruned?
There is no single interval: it depends on species, age and context. The right pruning is not “every year for safety,” but what that specific specimen needs — sometimes less frequently than one might think, sometimes in free-growth form. It is one of the choices the plan defines.
Can an unwanted tree removal be avoided?
Often yes. Before removal there is care, consolidation, monitoring. Removal remains the last option, when the risk is no longer reducible any other way — and in that case I state the reasons in writing.