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ACLA presented ‘Urban Future: The Rise of MegaCities’ at the Architecture Conference in HCMC in Vietnam

Robbert van Nouhuys delivered a paper to the conference outlining the impact of the urbanization trend and the creation of Megacities with 20 million inhabitants or more. In Asia, Megacities will become critical drivers to a nations’ economic development and require a rich mixture of a coexisting population and highly efficient support systems.

 

To drive maximum efficiencies he presented Megacity models with extreme densities of 1 million people on a 1 km 2 floor plate, called a SuperCluster. In comparison, the average density in downtown Shanghai is approximately 40,000 people per km 2. The SuperCluster achieves extreme densities by stacking land use functions, and using underground, vertical surface area and air rights, thereby increasing the overall useable surface area upto 15x its original 1 km 2 floor plate.

 

Robbert called for New Urban Thinking and Criteria driven by new technologies for construction, planning and management and acknowledgement of the unique opportunities this presents to quantum leap and spearhead a nation’s economic development and become a global benchmark.