The Vertical City

I always understood architecture as a tree. After a fire, a flood, of any catastrophe, even after man, nature surprises us with a new tree. A tree that emerges among the ruins and flies high. Nature, wise, adapts to changes. The branches, subsoil nets, look for water. The cups bloom in response to a thermal change. The bark, deep and layered, protects the structure. The tree itself is a structure that gives rise to colonization: plants, animals, insects and fungi seek optimal environments for survival in the tree. Together, they form a community. A system.

Society lives in urban environments. We are social beings and we need to live in optimum “habitats” to develop ourselves. The social transformation that humanity has experienced throughout its own history (due to the technical, social, and political advances) lead us, nowadays, to a new habitability strategy of territory which requires discussing the concentration and the human densification.

From a global point of view, cities have been changing in our way of occupying territories. Nowadays, the urban population is increasing year after year, and this exponential evolution develops without the formal, urban, and architectonic consideration, which is the near future, precisely, of all of urban environments that hold more than one thousand million people.

“We should encourage our energy-transport flows in order to ensure the growht of cities without compromising the further generations”

This unprecedented situation requires us to make a common effort of intelectual reflexion about the future of our reality. Cities work as living beings: they grow, they expand, they can reduce their size, and they can even die. Today, we find ourselves in a point where cities have broken their borders. Thus, the increase of the population density, building density, and the demanding resources means a great problem when guaranteeing the habitability of cities in the future.
Under a population flow, materialities, and scale analysis, we can base new strategies that let us make new optimum urban atmospheres for our own future as a society.
It seems impossible to give a unique solution for this problem, but the current demographic and economic changes along with the vanguard of technique in the field of vertical building allow us to have an effective solution for the coming

Density vs Space

It seems impossible to give a unique solution for this problem, but the current demographic and economic changes along with the vanguard of technique in the field of vertical building allow us to have an effective solution for the coming
This solution leads us to think of a sustainable future, where cities are not doomed to collapse but to reinterpret. The new city of the future holds out its hand to architecture as the best tool to define the new future of the city.

How will the future cities look like?

Based on the study we can argue that the Vertical City is a near reality. In fact, it is already a preexistence in many cities around the world, and according to growth estimates it will be a viable solution in the next fifty years.  Changes in our horizon must be the basis for the intellectual reflection of architecture. The concept of person and building, the scale of community and society are aspects that cannot be relegated to formal provisions. How we integrate our territory and our reality into a new future must be the most important challenge for this discipline.