Sustainable Compact Cities and High-Rise Buildings

Abstract

During the 21st century, therefore, the direction of cities was redirected as compact cities and this developed specifically under the concept of the sustainable compact city (see Figure 20.1b). The idea is to construct the urban elements in an efficient way but within compact limits. This has been categorized into reducing urban energy consumption to combat global warming; and revitalizing the traditional city centre, which has gone into decline as a result of suburbanization (AIJ and IBEC, 2002). In order to achieve the sustainable compact city, high-rise or tall buildings are seen as one of the best solutions because of the benefit of centralizing numerous functions of the city in one place, as shown in Figure 20.1b. The firsthigh-rise building was the 15-storey reliance building constructed in Chicago, which was built to take care of housing problems in the city. As more apartments were built to solve the housing problem, more functions were required in the city to satisfy the people living there. However, since the space of the city is limited to absorb all these problems, high-rise buildings accommodated all of these complex city functions. During the 1920s in New York, along with the development of cities and in order to display the national prestige of America, the 102-storey Empire State Building was constructed. This showed that highrise buildings can control city expansion and create many other value-added functions. At the end of the 20th century, the high-rise building boom centre has shifted from the US to Asia and now is expanding to all global cities (CTBUH, 2008) or to other international cities defined by super-tall buildings or high-rise buildings that are more than 50-storeys tall or over 200m. During the 21st century (as shown in Figure 20.1b), these high-rise buildings will effectively utilize the land of the metropolis, which was a densely populated city, to solve city population problems. In addition, their function is expected to result in energy savings by using environmentally friendly energy, by increasing the area of greenery in a city, and by decreasing transportation costs and air pollution due to the easing of traffic congestion.