World’s first Forest City
China’s Liuzhou Forest City is an innovative urban planning project that aims to combat air pollution and redefine the relationship with nature in a sustainable way.
“The scale of greenery planned is genuinely enormous. Liuzhou Forest City is expected to include around 40,000 trees and close to a million plants spread across more than 100 different species, covering rooftops, balconies and building facades. Rather than treating greenery as a decorative add on, the design treats it as a core structural feature of every building, meaning plants are built into the architecture from the ground up instead of being planted afterwards”.
Designed by renouned Italian architectural practice Stefano Boeri Architetti, the Liuzhou Forest City, located north of Liuzhou, is a Chinese city of about 1.5 million people in the southern and mountainous province of Guangxi, also it will be the world’s first Forest City.
The master plan, commissioned by Liuzhou Municipality Urban Planning Bureau, is currently being implemented and covers approximately 175 hectares along the Liujiang River.
The project expands on the successful experimentation carried out for the first time in Milan with the Bosco Verticale building prototype. This Chinese project expands on the Milan model to develop architecture and habitat on an urban scale redefining the relationship between human beings and biodiversity.
According to its designers, the Liuzhou Forest City master plan provided the green city with all the characteristics, from an energy point of view, of a fully self-sufficient urban settlement. It includes the use of geothermal energy for conditioning the buildings’ interior spaces, in conjection with widespread use of the roofs for highly efficient capture of solar and wind energy.
In addition to housing approximately 30,000 people, the new city will provide a comfortable living environment for the plants and trees present in all of the buildings: in total, the Liuzhou Forest City will house approximately 40,000 trees and 1 million plants representing over 100 different species.
The Forest City will absorb around 10,000 tons of CO2 and 57 tons of fine particles every year while producing around 900 tons of oxygen, effectively combating air pollution, with multiple vegetative and drainage urban surfaces.
The abundant spread of plants not only along avenues, in parks and gardens and also on building facades, will allow the new city to be self-sufficient in terms of energy. This will contribute to improving air quality, lowering the average temperature of the urban heat island, creating a noise barrier, and a rich ecosystem of living spaces for birds, insects, and small animals.
Thanks to this integrated approach, for the first time in the world an urban area combines the challenge of substantially reducing air pollution – a crucial and unavoidable issue today for the big cities of China, – combined with the application on a large scale of solutions for energy self-sufficiency and renewable energies.
Sources:
Times of India, July 15, 2026. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/132408881.cms
Parametric Architecture, March 5, 2023.
https://parametric-architecture.com/biodiversity-in-the-city-liuzhou-forest-city-by-stefano-boeri-architetti/
Stefano Boeri Architetti
