By 2020, the first Chinese Forest-Town (designed by Stefano Boeri Architects) will be reality: offices, homes, hotels, hospitals, schools fully covered with trees and plants.
The works for the construction of Liuzhou Forest City have just started. This is the name of the project of the forest-town that will be built north of Liuzhou, in Guangxi's southern and mountainous province, in an area of about 175 acres along the Liujiang River. Once completed, each year the new city of 30,000 inhabitants will be able to absorb about 10,000 tonnes of CO2 and 57 tonnes of particulates and produce about 900 tonnes of oxygen.
The new fully wired green city will be connected to Liuzhou city by a fast railway line used by electric motor cars, and will be hosting different residential areas, commercial and receptive spaces, as well as two schools and a hospital.
Liuzhou Forest City will have all of the features of a fully energy supply self-sufficient urban settlement, starting from the geothermal conditioning of the interiors and the widespread use of solar panels on the roofs for renewable energies’ production.
However, the true innovation introduced by Stefano Boeri Architetti's project is the presence of plants and trees on all the building, of any size and use. In fact, it is a large-scale reproduction of the Vertical Woods, the sustainable building winner of the “World's Best Architecture” award in 2015, which will be replicated in many places of the world (China, Nanjing, Shanghai and Shenzhen).
Overall, Liuzhou Forest City will include 40,000 trees and about 1 million plants of more than 100 species.
Plants will be not only along avenues, parks and gardens, but also on the façades of buildings, so as to help the city - already self-sufficient in energy supply - to improve air quality (by absorbing, besides CO2, the particulates for a total of about 57 tonnes per year), reduce the average temperature, create a barrier against the noise and increase biodiversity by creating a system of living spaces for birds, insects and small animals inhabiting the territory of Liuzhou.
For the first time in China and the world, a next-generation urban settlement will combine the challenge of energy self-sufficiency and the use of renewable energies with the one of increasing biodiversity and that - crucial to contemporary China - of significantly reducing air pollution in big cities, thanks to the multiplication of both vegetables and biological urban surfaces.
With the Liuzhou Forest City’s project, the studio led by Stefano Boeri goes on with its research around a new generation of architectures and urban settlements that challenge climate change and propose themselves as models for the future of the planet.
