Cities continue to grow, whilst heat, smoke, flooding and stress reshape what every day life appears like. As more people move into dense neighborhoods, green space increasingly looks less like a luxury and more like core infrastructure. For Mo Helmi, a landscape artist and founding father of Tricoastal Scapes, the longer term of urban life depends upon how well cities learn to live with nature again.
“A part of my work’s drive is believing that the importance of merging nature and science has never been as vital because it is now in our urban environments,” he says. His case is direct. “Almost 70% of the world’s population might be living in cities by the 12 months 2050.”
For those who plan, construct or move through those spaces on daily basis, that statistic becomes personal.
Why Biophilic Design Matters Now
Helmi argues that urban greening cannot stay at the extent of surface gestures. Nature has to operate. He designs green spaces that look beautiful, but additionally cool the air, support biodiversity and create places where people can exhale.
“I saw a vital gap within the landscape design industry,” he says, describing projects that claim sustainability while treating it as an add-on. His goal became clear: create spaces that profit people physically and mentally while supporting biodiversity and the environment, without sacrificing the great thing about the design.
That balance shapes his approach to biophilic urbanism, where plants, soil, and water management work as living systems over time. For Helmi, landscapes don’t sit beside architecture. They assist a city stay livable.
Design as Infrastructure, Not Ornament
Helmi’s path into landscape design began in a distinct sort of studio. He spent 15 years in fashion design and editorials in London and Milan. “Plants and gardens were at all times a passion and a source of inspiration for me during my fashion profession,” he says. That background taught him how people reply to aesthetics, texture, and narrative. It also taught him the right way to communicate vision.
When clients worry that ecological performance will dilute beauty, Helmi meets that fear with storytelling and specificity. “What helped me overcome this impression initially,” he says, “was with the ability to express a vision and set a scene for a client to assume themselves of their dream space.”
Case Study: The Soho Farmhouse Forest
One defining project transformed a former construction yard right into a rewilded forest with a wellness glade at its center. Designed for Soho House, the space uses the Miyawaki method to speed up ecological maturity and deepen biodiversity.
Helmi calls the FarmHouse Reforestation Project “beyond rewarding.” He later discussed it on a panel on the Soho Summit, closing with a line that also guides his work: “The mixing of design, science and nature continues to be in its post-fledgling stage, nevertheless it is showing a promising future for each humans and biodiversity.”
The purpose was proof, not poetry. Underused land can grow to be an ecological and cultural asset when it’s designed to perform.
Culture, Beauty, and the Future City
Helmi’s creative confidence comes from reinvention. Early on, he faced dismissiveness within the garden world. Some assumed fashion experience meant he couldn’t be taken seriously. He selected momentum as an alternative. “The rejections were a real gift,” he says.
Now based between London and Los Angeles, Helmi is pushing into public-health conversations and fire-aware landscapes in Southern California. “As we approach the primary anniversary of the Los Angeles fires,” he says, the thought of “aesthetically pleasing fire-aware landscapes” has grow to be urgent, and the design shifts will travel beyond California.
His long-term goal is daring and oddly easy: make urban nature desirable enough that folks value it as a standing symbol. “If I achieve changing the mindset to where people value attaining the ownership of a green space as much as they need to realize owning a Birkin,” Helmi says, “then it’s an enormous achievement.”