The climate change with its dramatic consequences on nature and society leads to reflection on the urgency of developing an adequate ecological transition to limit and prevent those processes that are harmful to humanity and the soil component. The city of Rome is among the urban centres with the highest soil consumption, 30,394 ha of soil consumed in 2022 (Munafò, 2023), yet several de-impermiabilisation strategies have been in place for several years to counteract environmental fragmentation and protect citizens’ well-being from the presence of polluted grey infrastructure. In the Garbatella district, an area dedicated exclusively to the absorption of fine dust caused by the intense vehicular traffic of the adjacent Via Cristoforo Colombo, one of the capital’s main arterial roads, has been created with ten lanes. In 2017, in the Garbatella park located in Via Rosa Raimondi Garibaldi, next to the Lazio Region building, bordered to the east by Via Cristoforo Colombo and managed by a local association, the Garbatella circle of Legambiente’s president Tommaso D’Alessio decided to create a small green infrastructure called the Intensive Forest, in line with the philosophy of biologist Akira Miyawaki, professor at Yokohama National University and director of the Japanese Centre for International Ecological Studies, according to which planting trees or shrubs close to each other would stimulate rapid growth due to biological competition for light and at the same time stimulate reciprocal protection from climate change by influencing the ever-decreasing demand for water, since extreme proximity facilitates the maintenance of humidity. With the prospect of further increases in temperatures and increasingly unpredictable rainfall, in terms of timing and intensity, the creation of an urban reforestation intervention that would act both as a rain garden during periods of flooding and as a heat island reduction intervention during the summer months was a necessary strategy to be tested in the park. The structure of the first “forest” is equivalent to a grid of 1.5 m × 1.5 m square modules forming a rectangle measuring 9 m × 18 m, with 192 species, most of them autochthonous. In the following years, the intensive woodland rapidly increased, some species were replaced, others were added later, and still others took over, as was the case in 2022 during the Ossigeno project financed by the Lazio Region, which allowed for a greater extension. Through the reading of the cited case study, which demonstrates a strong desire to transform a vulnerable area into a place of ecological reconnection, the article intends to focus attention on green strategies to safeguard health and social well-being in highly urbanised areas threatened by air pollution.