Toward a generous skyscraper

We are about to see the greatest building boom in history. By 2050, our global population is expected to exceed 9.5 billion people, with the number of households doubling from 1.9 billion in 2010 to 4.1 billion. To accommodate this, we will need to build more than 100 billion square metres of new residential floor area, not to mention workspaces, public buildings, schools, cultural facilities and city infrastructure.¹ Australia is not immune to such increases, with suggestions that 51 per cent of all buildings standing in 2050 will be built after 2019.² Building for such numbers, while simultaneously decarbonizing the built environment to tackle the climate crisis, represents one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century.

To accommodate this growth, we are often told we have two choices: either “build up,” embracing an increasingly vertical cityscape, or infill, with mid-rise urban development. For example, in 2016 the New South Wales Minister for Planning and Public Spaces, Robert Stokes, suggested that Sydney faced a choice between “a Shanghai route or a Barcelona route in terms of the shape of our city.” But such a “choice” belies both the scale and the complexity of accommodating such