China's New Forest City: The Fight Against Air Pollution Will Make You Rethink Urban Cities!

in #health7 years ago (edited)

If we think of China, we picture ourselves overpopulated cities with a nation plagued by polluted air. But that is about to change, meet the Italian architect Stefano Boeri he sees the opportunity to create cities where all kinds of plants, trees and bushes can bloom and people would be able to breathe in healthy air again. Therefore, he recently presented an ambitious plan to build the first Forest City in China.

The Rise Of The Forest City

Stefano Boeri was also responsible for the design of the Bosco Vertical towers on Porte Nuova, Milan's most important business district. As seen on the picture on the right. The Milanese Bosco Vertical towers have a thousand trees on the 110 meter balconies and 76 meter tall towers. Boeri also develops a vertical forest in the Swiss city of Lausanne. This 117-meter high-rise building has 36 floors and a total of 24,000 plants, including one hundred cedar trees of four different types.

At the moment, Stefano Boeri is working on two green residential towers in the Chinese city of Nanjing. He sees these green towers as a sort of organ transplant for the city. By making room for much green, the city needs to be a lot healthier. In addition, he has plans for a much larger project: Forest City Shijiazhuang. Boeri is dreaming about China, the country which is unfortunately known to have massive local pollution, and he wants to build new green cities and transform existing cities into little forests.

That is why he is working on a prototype for small, compact and green cities. The first Forest City will be assembled with large and medium-sized buildings. These buildings will be surrounded by all kinds of trees, shrubs and flowering plants and earned the name as Vertical Forests. Each vertical forest in the Forest City is equivalent to 20,000 square meters of forest area, describes the architect in his plan. The first Forest City will ultimately be 225 acres and accommodate 100,000 inhabitants. The city will consist of 5 districts in which approximately 20,000 people can live. Each district has its own composition of homes, offices, businesses, shopping centers, parks and gardens. In the central park there is room for public facilities such as a hospital, schools and cultural institutions.

War Against The Contamination

The first Chinese Forest City must be a sustainable city with low energy consumption. All green plants and trees on the balconies and roofs will ensure that there is a big difference between the temperature inside and outside. Especially in the summer, all that green has to bring a lot of cooling. In addition, all this vegetation will act as a filter to produce oxygen, absorb CO2 and protect people from high pollution in Chinese cities. By building more green cities and integrating greener into existing cities, the huge air pollution in China must be reduced.

Although Boeri has received several awards for his vision of sustainable construction, the method used to realize vertical forests raises some questions. Because due to the multiple use of concrete to support the heavy trees on the balconies and without knowing the exact CO² emissions the vertical forest might be not so durable. I personally am very curious on how this is going to work precisely and whether all these plants can actually grow in such a polluted environment. In addition, I obviously hope that China will also take other measures to reduce air pollution and make towns more sustainable. And hopefully we all can learn from projects like this and stimulate our environment with more and more nature.

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Wow, first time I read about Boeri and his forest cities...

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This looks great. I'm considering going to live in China soon to teach English. Check my posts if you like, I'm new to Steemit :)

being able to move to a foreign country and teach English to students seems to me like a wonderful experience, I wish you all the luck and welcome on Steemit!

英语老师,哈哈,来来,我教你汉语

Really great post filled with hope, glad I found this. I hope we all will be better on taking care of this planet and our lives. Thanks!

Thank you for your kind words @kerlund74 ! I can only hope the same 😇

Thanks a lot for your support @pandapoef

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Glad to see some visionary thinking of the environment

Nature is very Important , it’s not only the fact that humans are the cause of destroying larger parts of the nature world wide and take it for granted. But most of the people also have excluded it from their daily lives and with projects like this that raises environmental awareness and is trying to find balance between our building techniques and the nature, we are helping to restore that balance. And that is what I define as beautiful.

 7 years ago (edited)

If people want to see a sustainable future perhaps it's time to put their differences aside and consider a Resource Based Economy.
As long we don't see ourself as one organisme their will be greed, money, religion, inequality, pollution, politics, war, nationalisme, racisme, economic busts.
Humanity is so much more then it is today. if only they would apply their current technological knowledge without the obstacle of the current way our society operates.
I am aware this is unlikely to happen in my lifetime, we'd have to let go of our egos for this to work.
I see cryptocurrencies as a wonderful attempt to disolve the current power structure.
Unfortunately due to brainwashing by the media and our governments, elites and schooling, illogical people far outnumber those who take time to think for themselves.
I think people are too brainwashed to believe no one will work for something other then credits.
If you would like to learn about a resource based economy, here is a nice introduction video.
Never stop learning, peace.


Its a beautiful vision, and I hope all the possible problems are overcome and it will be interesting to see the forest city. I taught in Beijing for 6 months absolutely loved the place but someday's yes the smog was really bad. Great post

I'm sure it's in many countries not only China, and yes I hope the same however we first must get in touch with ourselves to reconnect again with the Earth. As long as we are expanding cities everywhere we won't be able to change it unless we let inventors and architects like Stefano Boeri change our habits, and combine building and nature together as a whole. We would stand alot further then ;) But I have faith in people <3

I agree completely and yes their are some amazing brains out there that want to do a lot of good of our planet x

I honestly can't wait to see this done in the future. We have to protect ourselves when were really killing ourselves.

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