Gómez Mendoza reconstructs Madrid’s urban tree culture through archival records, municipal management, cartographic series and technical writings, demonstrating that environmental form is inseparable from the institutions and knowledges that maintain it. The iconic contribution is to treat urban arboriculture as a historical environmental infrastructure rather than decorative scenery. Trees appear simultaneously as living material, climatic device, civic amenity, technical problem and administrative responsibility. Methodologically, the article combines documentary reconstruction with spatial evolution: municipal reports record species, irrigation, pathology, pruning and soil conditions, while maps reveal the changing distribution of planted space. This double evidence allows the urban landscape to be read as a cumulative management history. The bridge to environmental history and urban political ecology is precise: material environments endure only through repeated practices of care, expertise, allocation and repair, making maintenance a fundamental spatial process rather than a secondary operation performed after design.
URBANISM MEETS ART