Greening The Vertical Garden City

Can we truly ‘green’ the high-rise, high-density tropical city and bring ourselves closer to nature? This book argues that we can. The many ways to set a major city in an enormous garden have been tried and tested in Singapore, making it one of the greenest cities on earth. 

As cities strive to accommodate larger populations, there is logic in building upwards rather than outwards. High rise buildings provide far larger floor areas than the footprint. Those floor areas do not have to be indoors. Fully landscaped outdoor spaces, activity areas and connectors linking buildings can be woven into the horizontal and vertical fabric at many levels, from basement to the top of buildings.

In practice, the physical achievement of such ambitious green visions involves a great deal of work. Everyone involved will find that new tasks are added to the traditional scope. New greening elements have to be integrated with every conceivable component to ensure that everything works.

Greening the Vertical Garden City sets out to offer guidelines on the necessary tasks in the planning, design, costing, construction and long-term management processes. These are supported by photographs and diagrams illustrating potential construction and planting solutions as well as examples of completed work. For the city to be truly in a garden, the greenery must be continuous, and occur at every level, in every possible space.