04 Daniel Safarik - Vertical Cities in China and Beyond

Daniel Safarik is the Asian Director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), the world’s foremost authority on tall buildings.
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He chats with Lennon about tall buildings in China today, why China might be the perfect location to experiment with vertical cities, and how vertical cities would be implemented in the real world.

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"China is the most intense and extreme laboratory for something that all cities are struggling with." - Daniel Safarik
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Show Notes:

• Why China is undergoing a building frenzy
• What Daniel sees happening in the next 5-10 years
  About the large rural-to-urban migration happening
• How to build cities so that the history is preserved while making way for more people
• The advantages and drawbacks of planning from the top down in a communist country
• Why China is much less monolithic than outsiders are led to believe
• Some of the tall buildings that have been built in China
• How to integrate tall buildings into older neighborhoods that are built on a human scale

"There is a desire to push the pause button and think more carefully about how these developments are created." - Daniel Safarik

• The sky gardens of Shanghai Tower and how it creates a sense of being on the ground 
• How a true vertical city might come to be
• Who owns a skywalk in between buildings?
• What the turning point will be when vertical cities will gain momentum across the world
• Why some developers will need to be convinced to build something like a vertical city
• About the projects that Daniel is exciting about with the CTBUH

Links Mentioned:

• Learn more about Shanghai Tower
• Learn more about the Jin Mao Tower
• Connect with Daniel Safarik:
  • Twitter | Website

"There’s a shared responsibility for infrastructure that extends beyond the ground floor of a building." - Daniel Safarik