Building Vertical Cities: Daniel Winey at TEDxConnecticutCollege
The speaker, a nomadic architect, argues that future urban planning must move beyond horizontal, car-dependent sprawl by vertically integrating all necessary urban functions—housing, commerce, parks, and transit—into massive, self-sustaining structures. This paradigm shift is necessary due to extreme population growth in Asia, exemplified by China's projections, and is shown through the example of a proposed 125-story 'vertical City' design.
## Speakers & Context
- Nomadic architect; has traveled around Asia for 20 years, working in markets including Japan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia, Malaysia, and India.
- Sharing practical experiences to encourage thinking about designing cities in a different way.
## Theses & Positions
- Simply becoming more dense and going higher is not necessarily a sustainable model, nor does it guarantee a great City.
- A great city requires a balance of great places to live, shop, dine, and work, supported by culture, entertainment, and parks/open space.
- The future of urban design must shift from a horizontal effort to a vertical effort.
- The core philosophy is to think about "design rather City Planning and design rather than being a horizontal effort."
- The ultimate goal is to create "buildings that in fact are focused on people not Vehicles."
## Concepts & Definitions
- **Nomadic architect:** Describes the speaker's professional background of moving and working across various Asian markets.
- **Vertical City:** A structure that integrates multiple urban functions—housing, hotels, office space, entertainment, cultural venues, and seven major vertical parks—into one building.
- **Mega suburb:** The process of extracting single-family, monolithic homes from a community and scaling them up into high-rise buildings, as currently happening in China.
- **Horizontal effort:** Traditional city planning that spreads out across land, often necessitating car reliance.
- **Vertical effort:** The architectural approach of stacking and integrating all city functions within a singular, massive, multi-story structure.
## Mechanisms & Processes
- **Population Shift (China):** From 2000 to 2010, 250 million people moved from farm to urban areas; projections show another 300 million moving in the next two decades.
- **Urbanization Impact:** Beijing's transformation from a low-rise high-density city to one with high-rise, monolithic buildings dictated by planning codes requiring setbacks.
- **Mega suburb mechanism:** Single family homes, which require cars for daily function, are extracted from their original context and built vertically at a larger scale.
- **Vertical City Functionality:** Achieves density through integrated systems:
* Vertical transportation (elevators, escalators, stairways).
* Tied into all major Subways and bus routes.
* Energy generation: Wind turbines at the top, co-generation facilities at the base.
* Water management: Complete harvesting system recycling all falling and side-falling water.
* Structural integrity: Uses super columns (8 ft by 21 ft) and a dual skin (inner cylindrical, outer triangular/twisted) creating 17-story Atrium spaces that serve as vertical parks.
## Numbers & Data
- **China's urban population (2010):** 700 million citizens.
- **China's projected population shift:** Another 300 million people entering urban areas in the next two decades.
- **China's construction potential (by 2025):** Enough skyscrapers to fill 10 New York size cities, equivalent to almost 21 billion square feet (or 8,300 Empire State Buildings).
- **Houston population density:** Approximately 3,500 people per square mile (low-rise, low-density).
- **Hong Kong population density:** Almost 93,000 people per square mile (27 times more dense than Houston).
- **Building capacity:** The proposed structure will house 35,000 people daily (equivalent to 20% of New London's population and 10 times Mystic's).
- **Elevator count:** 106 elevators in the proposed structure.
- **Skyscraper height comparison:** The proposed building is 1,800 feet tall, making it about 200–300 feet taller than Sears Tower.
- **Structural comparison:** The proposed building requires 30% less structural steel than a conventional office building due to wind load consideration.
## Examples & Cases
- **Houston vs. Hong Kong:** Contrast of low-density, car-reliant sprawl versus dense, walkable mass transit city structure.
- **Beijing comparison:** Contrasting older, more integrated village density (where one could work, play, and live) with the modern, car-dependent high-rise reality.
- **Washington DC analogy:** Seeing the typical single-family, car-dependent suburban layout in the US, mirroring what is happening in China.
- **The proposed vertical City:** A demonstration structure featuring integrated housing, commerce, parks, and sustainable infrastructure within one building mass.
- **Beijing Ring Road:** Illustrated as a massive, multi-lane highway requiring overpasses/underpasses to cross, demonstrating transportation bottlenecking.
## Tools, Tech & Products
- **Wind turbines:** Installed at the top of the proposed building to generate power.
- **Co-generation facilities:** Located at the base of the building for power generation.
## Trade-offs & Alternatives
- **Low-density sprawl (Houston/US suburbs):** High land use, high reliance on cars, significant CO2 emissions.
- **High-density monolithic skyscrapers (Beijing):** Can be dictated by planning codes (like setbacks) which disrupts natural street life.
- **Vertical integration (Proposed model):** Offers superior resource efficiency (structural steel, energy) and keeps activity compact, supporting pedestrian life.
## Methodology
- Comparative urban case study: Comparing low-density sprawl (Houston) to high-density, vertically integrated models.
- Structural engineering consideration: Designing the structure to account for wind loads to reduce required materials (structural steel/concrete).
- Functional integration: Treating the building as an ecosystem where all necessities (living, working, leisure) are interwoven.
## Implications & Consequences
- **Lower land use:** Vertical cities are inherently more resource-efficient regarding land.
- **Improved living quality:** By focusing on pedestrian experience over vehicle throughput, the quality of life is enhanced.
- **Economic/Social Impact:** Higher land values are associated with compact, efficient structures.
## Verbatim Moments
- *"I'm sort of the nomadic architect as my daughter Madison knows."*
- *"China by 2025 is going to build enough skyscrapers to fill 10 New York size cities by 2025"*
- *"This is the birth of the mega suburb."*
- *"what makes a great City great places to live great places to shop and to dine viable businesses preferably close to where you live culture and entertainment and of course parks in open space"*
- *"I call this the birth of the Mega suburb"*
- *"what I'm really advocating is really sort of breaking The Stereotype and breaking the boundaries of City Planning and really looking at City Planning as more of architecture"*