Monaco: Bringing Nature Back into the City

How do you bring nature back into one of the world's most densely developed places? That's the question I've been working on with a multidisciplinary team led by Grant Associates, developing a long-term vision for a greener, more resilient Monaco — recently unveiled by the Government of Monaco.

At the heart of the vision are restored ecological corridors that reconnect the mountains behind the Principality with the Mediterranean, creating a framework for nature to extend through the city and support biodiversity, climate resilience, and healthier public spaces. Rather than a conventional masterplan, the approach retrofits nature into an intensely urban environment over time, with landscape as the organising framework for everything that follows.

My role was to bring urban tree canopy and green space analysis to the team — grounding the vision in data about what's actually growing (and what could grow) across one of the densest urban territories on Earth. It's a genuinely collaborative effort, working alongside Biodiversity by Design, studio 4215, Arup, Speirs Major, EcoMetrix Solutions Group, Space Syntax, Tim O'Hare, RLB | SQA, Ingérop, and Passage Projects.

The bigger question this raises has relevance well beyond Monaco: how can even our most densely developed cities make more space for nature?