(Stefano Boeri Architetti)
Ground has been broken on the world’s first forest city designed specifically to fight air pollution.
According to Inhabitat.com, construction on the Liuzhou Forest City started recently in the Guangxi Province and it’s expected to be complete by 2020. When it’s done, the city will feature many homes, offices, hotels, hospitals and schools completely covered by plants and trees. It’s going to be home to about 30,000 people and initial plans call for it absorbing over 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 57 tons of pollutants per year. In return, it will produce almost 900 tons of oxygen annually.
The incredible forest city was designed by Stefano Boeri Architetti and intends to use geothermal energy for interior air conditioning and solar panels to collect renewable energy. The green city will also be completely wired and connected to Liuzhou by a fast-rail system used by electric cars.
The city will host over 1 million plants, 40,000 trees and over 100 different species.
“The diffusion of plants, not only in the parks and gardens or along the streets, but also over building facades, will allow the energy self-sufficient city to contribute to improve the air quality (absorbing both CO2 and fine dust of 57 tons per year), to decrease the average air temperature, to create noise barriers and to improve the biodiversity of living species, generating the habitat for birds, insects and small animals that inhabit the Liuzhou territory,” the architecture firm wrote in a posting to its website.
The construction of the Chinese forest city comes after the architecture firm designed Bosco Verticale, two vertical forest residential towers that opened in 2014 in Milan, Italy. The towers host 900 trees and over 2,000 plants.
Check out some of the amazing renderings of the forest city below:
(Stefano Boeri Architetti)
(Stefano Boeri Architetti)
(Stefano Boeri Architetti)
(Stefano Boeri Architetti)
(Stefano Boeri Architetti)
The decision to construct the forest city comes after recent reports that despite a “war on pollution” declared by the country in 2014, air quality in has deteriorated as industrial production increases.
Liuzhou isn’t the only city in China with plans to re-invent it into a forest city. Stefano Boeri is also tasked with composing two forest towers in Nanjing that are similar to the ones in Milan. Those will be coated with 23 species of trees and over 2,500 shrubs and will be home to a hotel, offices, a museum and a school. That project is currently under construction and is set to be complete by 2018, The Guardian reported.
There’s also one in the works for Shijiazhuang, which is the city with the highest rate of air pollution in all of China. That forest city will be home for over 100,000 people.
