Vertical Urbanization: The Territorial Crisis of a Universal Model

Abstract

This research aims to examine, from the perspective of the urban design, the necessity and appropriateness of writing an architectural manifesto that questions, or rethinks, the vertical city model based on the orderly accumulation of slender and free columns – housing towers– where society must fraternize and develop life. The journey through the skyline of the main megalopolitan concentrations in countries such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico or those of the Pacific, shows us a landscape of dense residential conglomerates whose spatial and urban configuration was conceived almost a century ago. Vast extensions of vertical developments conquer, as a final and universal solution, plots without attributes between huge highways, old rice fields, deserts or even impossible topographies. With man's desire to live close to the clouds fulfilled and the technical challenge of rising in a vacuum having been overcome, the challenge should now point to the search for strategies that place the inhabitant again at the centre of the debate. By making the city taller, denser and faster, increases the difficulty of social participation for certain sectors of the population in their environment. Thus, the paper starts analyzing the influence of the precepts of the modern city in the contemporary vertical city. Later, it reflects on the loss of the public space dedicated for people and finally, it will deepen in the experiments of the avant-gardes of the second part of the twentieth-century to find alternatives growth strategies to the city of towers. The results show us that, due to overpopulation and the massive movement towards cities, as well as due to the necessary reduction of our footprint on the planet, is necessary to rethink the urban model of verticalism to get a more human city. As a conclusion, this paper proposes writing an architectural manifesto based on five points to achieve a vertical city for people in our near future.