A BRIDGE SHAPED SKYSCRAPER WILL SAVE THE WORLD - by Marchisciana Saverio Adriano | Saverio Adriano Marchisciana

Throughout the last two centuries the traditional model of urban development, based on uncontrolled land consumption, has led to a disproportionate and extensive growth of many cities around the world. This growth process has dramatically caused several cities to become wider and more crowded. Some urban areas, from being initially small, isolated and compact, have gradually merged to form first large cities with regional development, and then metropolis of national influence, known as megacities.

Today this unstoppable, very fast development is generating super cities of continental extension that can be defined as "supermegalopolis" or "super-megacities".

The super-mecities are immense urban structures - thousands of kilometers wide - that it is easy to see from the nighttime satellite photos of the Earth. From these pictures the lights of thousands of cities clearly seem to occupy huge spaces and this undeniably proves how overbuilding is irretrievably swallowing up fertile lands and green areas such as forests and agricultural plains all over the world (picture 01).

Many scientists believe that global climate change depends on the constant increase of greenhouse gas levels, but it might also be connected to the substantial reduction of forests coverage. This is why our team has chosen - for the theme of this competition - to focus on recovery and regeneration of natural forests. Our purpose aims to obtain, through an appropriate redesign of contemporary cities, a model of growth capable of reducing Land Consumption to the minimum. We imagined a kind of bridge shaped skyscrapers which rest on the ground, occupying very small portions of surface. Each skyscraper is designed as an independent urban district which belongs to a new generation of cities that do not expand directly on the ground, as the cities of today do, but which are suspended to form a parallel world, developed on a higher level. For this reason we can call these cities by the term "suspended cities" (picture 04). These bridge shaped skyscrapers contain modular housing units, shops, services and public parks, and thanks to that the residents can live for several days inside these autonomous buildings with no need to go outside.

Our project, that today may seem utopian, in the future could become a feasible idea. In order to achieve this project it will be necessary to rethink from the beginning every single city in the world which will have to be rebuilt by placing on the territory big series of bridge shaped skyscrapers ( picture 03). To make these new cities efficient it will be fundamental to connect the skyscrapers to one another by monorail trains or shuttle that allow a rapid shift through this new suspended city. Based on this idea, all the cities that form a supermegalopolis will be linked each other through national high-speed railway lines (picture 02/03). As a consequence of this new generation suspended city, the natural surface of the continent will be set free from overbuilding and this will allow the recovery and regrowth of forests, farmland and rivers. All animal species will benefit, without any doubt, as they will have more space to live in. The rivers also will benefit from this change as the natural water can freely flow into the ground. In the final analysis, only these conditions may restore the natural balance of the Earth's climate, which today is compromised.

Our project idea that we randomly set in the Latin American continent, and in particular in the city of Rio de Janeiro (picture 05/06) should be thought as a feasible solution that can be applied to any super-megacities in the world, from the high densely populated asian megacities such as those in India, China, Japan, to those located in Europe and North American continent.