After months of hard work and collaboration, the Vertical City team is proud to announce that the 1st Vertical City Conference will be held in Tianjin, China this fall.

​This conference will explore how the Vertical City concept can contribute to the development of metropolitan areas and mega metropolitan areas such as Jing Jin Ji in China.  

​This 2-day event will include 10 presentations and 3 panel discussions. All speakers are accomplished professionals such as Kenneth King, architect; Chien Chung Pei, architect; Dennis Poon, engineer; Richard Register, ecocity theorist; Daniel Safarik, architect and journalist; Karl Schöllkopf, engineer; Lei Yi'an, professor; Mao Qizhi, professor; Hao Shouyi, professor; and Hong Zaisheng, professor. The conference will be facilitated by Jame C. Jao, architect. 
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The conference is FREE and open to the public but registrations are required.

This event would not be possible without our partners: CTBUH (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat), Tianjin University, Nankai University, Tsinghua University, and Peking University.

Click the button to learn more about the conference and register!

​One factor that contributes to our changing climate is our expanding population. Increasing numbers means increasing demands for space, food and power. In response, some ingenious people contributed to writing a book about solving the problem. They called it, the Vertical City.

The concept is based on a very simple notion; that we are running out of space. By as soon as 2050, there could be as many as 10 billion people on earth, 80% of whom will be living in urban areas. When you consider how much of the total amount of land on earth is unusable, how much is needed for farming and power generation, a population of 10 billion means space would be hard to come by. The theory, then, is to build upwards, instead of outwards. Instead of sprawling cities and infrastructure and urban landscapes, you have a small number of huge skyscrapers, interconnected with one another, providing all the needs of the inhabitants.

Land is becoming scarce as the world's population grows and environmental changes shrink the amount of livable space on Earth. Some creative thinkers say the solution is to build up.

A nonprofit organization called Vertical City aims to garner support for so-called vertical cities — Tetris-like arrangements of interconnected towers designed to support thousands of residents.
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These proposed structures, which can be up to 400 floors, contain all the components of a city, from housing and hospitals to universities and municipal departments. Advocates claim vertical cities will save energy, support a growing population, and preserve land for food production, nature, and recreation — if we can figure out a way to build them.

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.

​Cities will need to be denser and taller in the future. It's the only way to accommodate a global population of 9 billion-plus people and increasing demand for urban living (70% of us could live in cities by 2050, according to some projections). The alternative is surely worse: More sprawl taking up what little green space is left.

The concept of a "vertical city," as sketched out in a new book by architects Kenneth King and Kellogg Wong, is something more than a hyper-dense Gotham, though. Yes, there are a lot of towering buildings but also parks, schools, hospitals and restaurants at upper levels, as well. Essentially, it's a vision of a complete ecosystem in the sky—a place you never have to leave if you don't want to.

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...