Half a century ago the architect Paolo Soleri promoted the idea of an Arcology, “a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy resources and time, and tendency to isolate people from each other and the community.”

Today there is a new vision that is a direct descendant: the Vertical City. Eighteen months ago TreeHugger wrote about a Kickstarter to produce a book and a video that would describe a building form that “can save energy, support our growing population and preserve our horizontal spaces for food production, nature and recreation.” The book was released recently, and the video premiered in New York City this past Friday.

The concept of the Vertical City is fascinating and attractive to some people, and totally repulsive to others. In principle, living and working in a building hundreds of stories high makes a great deal of sense; it prevents the loss of farmland and natural greenbelts, it reduces air pollution (since all commuting is vertical where the distances are much shorter and the transport mechanism much more efficient) and reduces the need for all the roads that service horizontal cities, so people can just walk out into parkland. This is why I have been so fascinated with the work of Zhang Yue and Broad Sustainable Building and his vision of a 220 storey Sky City.

Others are deeply committed to the concept too; Authors Kenneth King and Kelogg Wong are putting together a coffee table book promoting the idea of the vertical city. They have developed an impressive Manifesto...