From Concrete to Canopy: How Mo Helmi Builds Urban Environments That Thrive

By Matthew Kayser

Cities keep growing, even as heat, smoke, flooding and stress reshape what daily life feels 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 founder of Tricoastal Scapes, the future of urban life depends on how well cities learn to live with nature again.

“Part of my work’s drive is believing that the importance of merging nature and science has never been as important as it is now in our urban environments,” he says. His case is direct. “Almost 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities by the year 2050.” 

If you plan, build or move through those spaces every day, that statistic becomes personal.

Why Biophilic Design Matters Now

Helmi argues that urban greening cannot stay at the level of surface gestures. Nature has to function. He designs green spaces that look beautiful, but also cool the air, support biodiversity and create places where people can exhale. 

“I saw an important gap in 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 benefit people physically and mentally while supporting biodiversity and the environment, without sacrificing the beauty of 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 do not sit beside architecture. They help a city stay livable.

Design as Infrastructure, Not Ornament

Helmi’s path into landscape design began in a different kind of studio. He spent 15 years in fashion design and editorials in London and Milan. “Plants and gardens were always a passion and a source of inspiration for me during my fashion career,” he says. That background taught him how people respond to aesthetics, texture, and narrative. It also taught him how 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 being able to express a vision and set a scene for a client to imagine themselves in their dream space.”

Case Study: The Soho Farmhouse Forest

One defining project transformed a former construction yard into a rewilded forest with a wellness glade at its center. Designed for Soho House, the space uses the Miyawaki method to accelerate ecological maturity and deepen biodiversity.

Helmi calls the FarmHouse Reforestation Project “beyond rewarding.” He later discussed it on a panel at the Soho Summit, closing with a line that still guides his work: “The blending of design, science and nature is still in its post-fledgling stage, but it is showing a promising future for both humans and biodiversity.”

The point was proof, not poetry. Underused land can become an ecological and cultural asset when it is designed to perform.

Culture, Beauty, and the Future City

Helmi’s creative confidence comes from reinvention. Early on, he faced dismissiveness in the garden world. Some assumed fashion experience meant he could not be taken seriously. He chose momentum instead. “The rejections were a true 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 first anniversary of the Los Angeles fires,” he says, the idea of “aesthetically pleasing fire-aware landscapes” has become urgent, and the design shifts will travel beyond California.

His long-term goal is bold and oddly simple: make urban nature desirable enough that people value it as a status symbol. “If I achieve changing the mindset to where people value attaining the ownership of a green space as much as they wish to attain owning a Birkin,” Helmi says, “then it is a massive achievement.”