Page 12 - Vertical City

12 The vertical city

been built in China 8 only in the past fifty years. With
no environmental planning, the ground that these cities
have been built upon, far from being freed for a natural
environment, is covered with asphalt and encumbered
by horizontal industrial buildings while, as we shall see,
it is both rational and economically viable to organize
all the activities of new small cities within vertical struc-
tures, connected by passageways, in order to free up
the ground for outdoor activities, agriculture and biodi-
versity. These small cities organized in clusters thus form
a larger polycentric city.

Contrary to this, the concept of the small, reaso-
nable and classical city of four or five stories that still
guides the development of Masdar City, a new city for
50.000 inhabitants in 2020 (in construction since 2008
for 15 billion dollars or 11 billion euros) located in the
desert of Abu Dhabi 9, can be questioned as to whether
or not it will resist the cyberspace of generations to
come, or will it simply perpetuate as a consequence of
the failure to study, construct and organize a pleasant,
small vertical city despite the overriding occupation of
the soil by construction?

8 All Chinese cities, until 1950, were built on one level, such as the
“siheyuan” and their alleyways “hutong” in Beijing, or the “shiku-
men” and its alleyway “Lilong” in Shanghai.

9 Alas, it already suffers from maintenance problems.