Asian Cairns, Shenzhen (China), by Vincent Callebaut Architectures © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Vincent Callebaut Architectures | Asian Cairns

Vincent Callebaut Architectures presents their new project: Asian Cairns, the sustainable farmscrapers for rural urbanity. At the end of 2011 in China, the number of inhabitants in the cities exceeded the number of inhabitants in the countryside. Whereas 30 years ago only one Chinese person out of five lived in the city, the city-dwellers represent now 51.27% of the total population of 1 347 billion of people. This urban population is supposed to increase to 800 million of inhabitants within 2020 spread mainly in 221 cities of at least one million of inhabitants (versus only 40 in Europe of the same scale) and 23 megapolis of more that five million of inhabitants.

Asian Cairns, Shenzhen (China), by Vincent Callebaut Architectures © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

According to Li Jianmin, an expert in demography from the Tianjin University, the Chinese population will be urban at 75% within 2030! Facing this massive rural exodus and the unrestrained acceleration of the urbanization, the future models of the – green, dense and connected – cities must be rethought from now on! The challenge is to create a fertile urbanization with zero carbon emission and with positive energy, this means producing more energy that it consumes, in order to conciliate the economical development with the protection of the planet. The standard of living of everyone will thus be increased by respecting at the same time the standard of living of everybody.

Asian Cairns, Shenzhen (China), by Vincent Callebaut Architectures © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

Benefiting from its privileged geographical position in the heart of the Chinese megalopolis of the Delta of the Pearl River, Shenzhen faces a spectacular economic and demographic development. Since the return of Hong Kong to China, both cities have been merging together and constitute now one of the greatest Chinese metropolises with more than 20 billions of inhabitants! In this context of hyper growth and accelerated urbanism, the “Asian Cairns” project fights for the construction of an urban multifunctional, multicultural and ecological pole. It is an obvious project to build a prototype of green, dense, Smart city connected by the TIC and eco-designed from bio technologies! The master plan is designed under the shape of three interlaced spirals that represent the 3 elements which are fire, earth and water, all organized around air in the middle. Each spiral curls up around two megalithic towers and forms urban ecosystems implanting the biodiversity in the heart of the City under the shape of vast public orchards and urban agriculture fields. Huge basins of viticulture and vast lagoons of phyto-puration recycle the grey waters rejected by the inhabited vertical farms.

Asian Cairns, interior, by Vincent Callebaut Architectures © Vincent Callebaut Architectures

The six gardening towers engraved in a Golden Triangle pile up a mixed programmation superimposing farmscrapers cultivated by their own inhabitants. Like our Dragonfly project in New York, the aim is to repatriate the countryside in the city and to reintegrate the food production modes into the consumption sites. The megalithic towers are based on cairns, artificial stone heap present on the mountains to mark out the hiker tracks. Clever exploits of the construction, these six towers pile up housing, offices, leisure spaces in the monolithic pebbles superimposed on each other along a vertical central boulevard. This central boulevard constitutes the structural framework of each tower. It choreographs the human flows, distributes the natural resources and digests the waste by sorting and selective composting. True city quarter piling up mixed blocks, these cairns make the urban space denser by optimizing also the quality of life of its inhabitants by the reduction of means of transport, the implantation of a home automation network, the re-naturalization of the public and private spaces and the integration of clean renewable energies.

more. vincent.callebaut.org