In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

A bustling car-filled street by day and a 1,500-foot pedestrian promenade on weekend nights, Sai Yeung Choi Street South in the dense neighborhood of Mong Kok was the stage upon which urban life in Hong Kong played out – markets, music, dancing, protests, parties. Clashes with police. Noise. So much noise, in fact, that after 1,200 complaints in a single year, the district council decided to end the street’s 18-year run as a part time pedestrian zone and reopen it to vehicular traffic 24/7. What will this mean for a city where public transit accounts for 90 percent of daily passenger trips, yet infrastructure revolves around cars?

Some Hong Kong residents see the Mong Kok street’s closure as emblematic of the cultural battle between everyday transit-riding urbanites who embrace city life and everything that comes along with it (including noise) and ‘elites’ who flood cities from elsewhere and expect to change how they operate to better fit their own needs. This might sound familiar to, say, San Franciscans. Walkability is a crucial quality-of-life factor for many city dwellers, but it remains in tension with both car culture and a general lack of affordability. So why do some major pedestrian zones in big cities flourish while others fail?

A History of Mixed Success

The pedestrian mall as we know it today was born in the German city of Kassel soon after the end of World War II. British bombers had leveled 80 percent of the city. City planners tasked with rebuilding decided it was the perfect opportunity to re-orient the old town’s streets to create a direct connection from the center square to the main railway station and create a distinct shopping district where pedestrians could stroll along the streets without worrying about cars.

The fountain-filled square, called Treppenstrasse, was soon copied by other German cities, and the idea spread throughout Europe. Meanwhile, in America, the first pedestrian mall opened in 1959 in Kalamazoo, Michigan and multiplied in a similar fashion, all in the hope of reviving depressed downtown areas.

What these pedestrian zones were essentially trying to recapture – in a shiny new package befitting the 1950s – was the charm of meandering medieval streets no more than a few meters wide. Crucially, these often cobblestoned streets were built at a human scale, designed to accommodate people strolling along with carts and horses rather than rows of parked vehicles and 48-foot-long semi trucks. That’s rarely the case now, especially when attempting to retrofit spaces built for cars into pedestrian-friendly areas that attract a lot of foot traffic and, ultimately, spending.

There was one major problem with ‘50s pedestrian malls right off the bat. At the time, few people lived downtown. As soon as workers went home for the day, the promenades were abandoned. It would be decades before populations began to shift toward urban centers en masse, and in the meantime, the pedestrian mall experiment was declared a failure. Fewer than 15 percent of the malls that opened during that era remain in place today.

This process of pedestrianizing certain blocks and then reopening them to traffic continued throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and ’90s, by which time shoppers were demanding plenty of free parking and covered spaces. Walking outdoors to shop and dine was old fashioned; the suburban mall reigned supreme.

Chicago’s State Street pedestrian mall closed after 17 years in 1996 due to a drop in commercial activity. In Buffalo, New York, there weren’t enough people spending time downtown to support its pedestrian zone. In Sacramento, K Street went from a vibrant destination to a wasteland to a bustling pedestrian zone and back to a wasteland before the city ripped out the pedestrian-friendly infrastructure and reopened it to traffic in 2011 – only for locals to call for reversing the decision yet again, just five years later.

But what about the ones that work? New York City temporarily closed a 2.5 acre-section of Times Square to vehicular traffic for safety reasons, but it became so popular with pedestrians, the city made it a permanent feature and even had the architecture firm Snøhetta redesign it. Denver’s 16th street mall is thriving, as is Miami’s Lincoln Road Mall. Smaller college towns like Charlottesville, Iowa City and Madison have maintained popular pedestrian zones as crucial parts of their identities. In Europe, the cities of London, Paris, Oslo, Madrid, Milan, Dublin and Stockholm all have plans to create or expand significant car-free areas.

Walkability Requires Careful Planning – And Greater Equality

From all these failures and successes, it seems like the keys to making cities more walkable long-term are tailoring the scale and design of pedestrian zones to the setting, expecting roughly 15-year cycles of changing trends, accommodating businesses with features like early morning loading zones, figuring out where all the vehicular traffic will go instead to avoid worsening congestion and standing firm in commitment to reducing car usage in the area. That last point might just be the hardest one to tackle.

Some shoppers would rather give up on trying to access downtown areas due to a lack of parking than ride the bus instead, and as long as city planners continue to build massive parking garages, urban streets will remain snarled. Pedestrian zones must be integrated with public transit, taking the pressure off the streets and allowing equitable access. By many accounts, we’re moving toward an era in which car sharing will vastly reduce the number of vehicles on the roads, so we might as well begin planning for it now.

Closing certain blocks to vehicular traffic part-time, like Austin’s Sixth Street, could be a convenient workaround for many cities, or at least a way to test the waters. But that brings us back to Mong Kok, which could set a precedent for the closure of Hong Kong’s other pedestrian zones due to noise complaints amidst worsening air quality from automobile emissions. Licensing systems for vendors and performers could help, but the greater problem remains the fact that Hong Kong has begun to prioritize the needs of drivers over those of the vast majority of the population.

If we want thriving cities where people actually want to congregate, walk around and spend money, we have to preserve their historic character, cultural traditions and mix of income levels. That means addressing inequality directly and limiting the influence of wealthy residents who try to sweep evidence of that inequality under the rug, like homelessness in San Francisco.

Beneath the revival of big cities around the world is a deep economic rift that makes it hard for service workers, teachers, nurses and firefighters to live in the cities where they work, let alone shop. The urban tides might pull the affluent back out into the suburbs before long, anyway, so our cities should be designed to thrive with or without them.

Top image: Times Square pedestrian redesign by Snøhetta

How will various cities around the world adapt to rapid population growth while maintaining quality of life and responding to their unique environments and cultural context? In some cases, new ideas for maximizing urban density require building new cities from the ground up, while others reclaim industrial areas and depressed suburbs or simply keep building higher and higher into the sky. These proposals – some fanciful, others currently under construction or completed – represent a diverse variety of urban growth solutions, each with its own pros and cons.

Lush Pedestrian-Oriented Vision for Singapore

The ‘PARKROYAL on Pickering’ is a pedestrian-oriented elevated neighborhood for Singapore with lush greenery planted on nearly every level and a porous layout encouraging daylight, cross-breezes and free circulation between the various elements of the structure. The 2015 winner of the Urban Habitat Award by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), the Parkroyal was praised for being “intelligently influenced by both its environmental and cultural context.” A contoured podium draws inspiration from terraced landscapes like rice paddies, and a series of columns resembling trees makes the entire building seem to hover above the street, establishing a shaded pedestrian thoroughfare on the ground level. By stretching upward, the building design with all of its integrated greenery adds 215% new green space to the plot area, proving that increasing density in cities doesn’t have to mean losing parks and gardens.

Cities Carved Into Coastal Cliffs

The ‘Living on the Edge’ project imagines building new cities right into coastal cliffs around the world, forming new urban environments. While it would seem like expanding human developments into areas that are currently in their natural state isn’t exactly desirable (not to mention the threat of rising seas), the designers contend that making use of these spaces high above the water level would be better than allowing currently-existing cities to keep sprawling outside their urban boundaries into surrounding forests and agricultural land.

Shop-Top Neighborhood in Beverly Hills

As multiple functions compete for space in crowded cities, the answer is often to build tall structures full of apartments that sacrifice the classic suburban neighborhood feel for density and walkability. But what if we could have both? 8600 Wilshire by MAD Architects places a relatively traditional neighborhood complete with green spaces and trees right on top of a retail block in Beverly Hills. The clustered white glass villas offer 18 residential units in the form of a ‘hillside village,’ with the houses appearing opaque from the street but facing the inner courtyard with transparent facades.

High-Density Urban Development Inspired by Chinese Mountains

Another MAD project “treats architecture as a landscape,” integrating waterfalls, trees and gardens into a high-density urban development with curvaceous structures mimicking traditional Chinese paintings of mountain ranges. ‘Shan-shui City’ is a concept that can be applied to all sorts of building projects, and MAD aims to make use of it in both all-new construction projects in China and as supplements to existing cities. They will apply it to a mixed-use urban development that’s half a million square meters in size, and new plaza development in Beijing’s central business district.

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Presented at the 2016 Venice Architecture Bienalle, these new communities are designed to be entirely self-reliant, recycling their own waste, generating their own energy and producing their own food. Urban, suburban and rural strategies are combined in fresh ways that could lead to a new paradigm for sustainable living.

Dubbed ReGen by its creators at EFFEKT, this new self-sustaining community typology grew out of a Stanford University Paper. Thanks to the backing of entrepreneurs, the first pilot is set to launch in The Netherlands this summer with others coming soon to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany and planned for China and Africa.

Each village features combinations of homes, greenhouses and public buildings, interconnecting vertical farming efforts with everyday living. Like a dome-free version of some retrofuturistic 1960s vision, the idea is that each village unit is effectively self-contained, able to thrive off the grid without polluting or depending on outside resources.

Unlike other Utopian schemes, however, a great deal of design, science, engineering and money is going into making these work. The housing and community layouts reflect new urbanist sensibilities (such as walkability and density) as well as ruralist traditions (agriculture and access to nature).

Integrated solar power systems provide energy for heating, cooling and electric cars. Community participants share responsibility for water and waste management systems. Fruits and vegetable are grown individually as well as communally. Various housing types are offered, each with adaptable modularity designed around seasonal energy savings and human comfort factors.

“Our modern lifestyle is utterly unsustainable and this calls for more resilient solutions for the future,” explained EFFEKT partner Sinus Lynge. “The technology already exists, it is just a matter of applying science into the architecture of everyday life. ReGen Villages is engineering and facilitating the development of off-grid, integrated and resilient neighbourhoods that power and feed self-reliant families around the world. The time has come to redefine residential real-estate development for the next three billion people coming to the planet.”

Built in 1828, the first enclosed shopping mall in America now has affordable housing beyond its grand Ionic columns in place of cramped, struggling retail stores, with most of the historic architectural details preserved. A project of Northeast Collaborative Architects (images by Ben Jacobsen Photography), this project could signal a new phase in adaptive reuse with respect to interior malls both old and new.

Rhode Island’s Providence Arcade began its long tenure in the capital city’s downtown district as Westminster Arcade, three stories of shops under a glass gable roof with sunlight streaming down to the first level in the airy atrium. But even back then, nobody seemed to want to go beyond the first level, putting the mall at risk of being razed decade after decade.

Preservationists intervened to save it in 1944, and it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, which still didn’t do much for business. It languished, with most of its retail spaces empty, until its closure in 2008, when its owners realized it had become “economically obsolete.” But as housing costs in the city rose through the proverbial roof, one developer saw the potential for the Arcade to shift its primary purpose.

A $7 million renovation completed in October 2013 added 38 standard rental units  and eight larger apartments to the second and third floors, keeping the bottom floor for commercial use. The micro apartments measure from 225 to 300 square feet and include a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and storage, including built-in bed platforms and wardrobes. Some even have sleeping spaces for guests in the form of twin Murphy beds.

Residents at the complex also have access to a game room, laundry facilities and additional storage space, and in case you’re wondering what it would be like to basically live in a mall, the commercial spaces on the bottom floor are enclosed by bay windows to keep noise to a minimum. Rent starts at just $550 a month, luring in a waitlist that’s at least 4,000 names deep.

“Keeping young professionals and their incomes in Providence is critical for economic growth,” writes Cheryl Hackett. “The goal of this project demonstrates that a historic building can be reimagined to provide affordable housing for those struggling with the current real estate market. The micro lofts are located in the heart of the business district and their walkability feature eliminates tenants’ worries about commuting and paying for parking.”