Located in a southern suburb of Paris, at the center of a number of highway infrastructure junctions, at the time of the project the Belle Epine shopping center has been on site for over twenty years. The site is a sort of caricature of the peri-urban environment. The buildings had been recently renovated, but with a striking absence of architectural or urbanistic ambition.

The project consisted in “embellishing” the vast parking area with a modest budget of roughly 1 million euros that left an “in-depth” recomposition of the site out of the question. We therefore proposed the installation of a perennial plant arrangement that would immediately enhance the functioning of the site and would above all increase the quality of the territory over the long term. All means were utilized in the implementation of a visible vegetation, replacing about 100 parking spots with the planting of 120 very tall trees, eachtree reaching around ten meters in height. Using the plant organization of a “sparse wooded area”, the project adapted to the context of the site and its extended surface. The trees were set up using specific technical means, with each planting unit taking up the equivalent of a parking space. This principle allowed for the adaptation to the constraints of the grid-like partition of the ground, setting aside enough ground space for each tree.