More than 12 million people make urban Tokyo one of the most crowded places in the world.Another 2,5 million flood in from the suburbs each morning.The city is packed to the breaking point.If a bold engineering proposal by Japan’s Shimizu Cooperation becomes reality, there may be some surprising new real estate, right in the middle of Tokyo bay.In a ‘mega city ‘.It’s shape is familiar, but this is unlike anything on earth.
The Shimizu is not a building, it is a revolutionary urban environment.It squeezes 2 dozen 80 stories skyscrapers into a 3-dimensional frame.It’s footprint would cover an area the size of 275 city blocks.To let the equivalent amount of land, would cost more than 10 billion a year. The Shimizu is proportionally similar to the Great of Egypt, an assembly of 55 smaller s, each about of the size of the Giza . It would host 750,000 people.
The real marvels of this massive structure are the ‘mega trosses’.These are the bones of the circulatory system of the living city and they contain the critical transportation that keep hundreds of thousands of people on the move.Anetwork linked by a 140 kilometres of horizontal and diagonal area tunnels meeting at 65 transfer points called ‘nodes’.It’s not much smaller than an average city transit system, but it’s squeezed into an area just about 1/50th of the size.
A complete, self-contained, self-sufficient city. With homes, businesses, parks, … everything anyone could ever need. Of course, there are still some technical issues to overcome, but if build, the ‘Shimizu ‘ will be the largest structure on earth.