Skyscrapers and Vertical Cities: Part One

it's something that we've talked about on this podcast before. Sure, it's it's something we come back to a lot because it is one of the big trends that's influencing the way human civilization develops, and that is the urbanization trend, which has been going on since the Industrial Revolution. Really yeah, well, I mean one might argue it's basically been going on since the what would you say, like the major last

civilizational collapse. Would that be the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yeah, but you know, you really saw a move from pastoral to urban once mechanization really started taking all. Yeah, at any rate, that's the trend we're talking about to launch

this episode. Well, it's certainly taken off in the past centuries, so definitely you can you can definitely say it's then For example, according to the twenty fourteen World Urbanization Prospects Report, and that's put out by the United Nations, in nineteen fifty thirty percent of all the people alive were urban living in cities. By twenty fourteen, that number was fifty

four percent. So that's a pretty big jump, right, more than half now, right, And by twenty fifty they are expecting that a full two thirds of human beings, sixty six percent of all the people alive, are going to be living in cities. Which, on one hand you might be like, yeah, so I know cities are more populated than the country side, but just think about it for a second. How many people are going to be alive in twenty fifty. I think they've predicted about what nine

to ten billion? Yeah, in that Yeah, the prediction ran vary quite a bit, but yes, somewhere more than we have now. Yeah, so two thirds of that nine to ten billion going to be living all in less than one percent of the surface area of the planet. Right. And so we're seeing not just a lot of people moving to cities, but obviously cities, certain cities are growing very rapidly, some of which have reached a level that

we now refer to as megacity. We actually did a podcast on the rise of megacities in When did we do that? That would have been in twenty fifteen July of twenty fifteen, and there were two episodes, really what one was called the Mega City Era and the other was called Will Earth Become coarsont Oh. That one was a lot of fun where we looked at the planet on Star Wars that's just one giant city and said, is that even possible? Is that? Is that desirable? Is

that physically Okay, yeah, yes, it's desirable. No, it's a city boy right, yeah, city mouse right. So but if you're interested in those topics, you can go check out those things. Essentially, the idea is that the number of cities with more than ten million inhabitants in the same

city has been going up. In nineteen fifty, I think there were only a couple cities on the whole planet that met this criteria New York City, which was in the lead, then was followed up by Tokyo, and then if you look at today now there are twenty five total cities that have more than ten million people in THEMLOW Now is that a questionable number because what counts as the city or yes, because like, for example, if we were to take Atlanta, the city of Atlanta is

one particular area, right, it's not that it's not even everything that's within what we call the perimeter RH two eighty five. It's a highway that encircles part of the metro Atlanta area. Yes, but the actual legal municipality of the city of Atlanta is a place with boundaries, and only a certain number of Atlanta's population in giant air quotes which you can't see because this is radio, only only a small portion of that population lives within those

city limits. Right, But I either one would qualify as a mega city. No, no, no, even if you even if you looked at the entire metro Atlanta area, it would not qualify as a mega city. Mega cities have to have more than ten million people. But if you, you know, depending on how you define it, you've got about twenty five cities that make that list. Topping the list now is Tokyo. Tokyo has more than left New

York behind. Oh yeah, Tokyo. If you look at the Greater Tokyo area, which no one really agrees on what that means, Like it that you have political divisions. On one hand, you have the idea of well, where do people live versus where do they commute into from to go to work, that kind of thing. A lot of different considerations to make there. But in general, you're talking around thirty four million people in the Greater Tokyo area.

I think you can be sure you've left the Tokyo area when people are speaking like Russian or and not Japanese anymore, unless you're in Little Russia in Tokyo, in which case you might actually still be there. But no, there are a lot of other cities that are in that list as well, Seoul, Shanghai, Guangshu, Delhi, Mexico City, Beijing, lots of others. So in New York City, by the way, the only really US city that is commonly referred to as a mega city. Yeah, a lot of this urbanization

that we've seen in recent years. I mean, it's happening all over the world, but especially in Asia. Yeah, and so the massive flow of humankind into these geographically centralized, sort of small areas is not without its challenges and concerns, right, No, yeah, sure, I Mean the biggest one I would argue is the idea of sprawl, like we were talking about with Metro Atlanta,

that it sprawls out over multiple counties. Now, to be fair, Georgia has about as many counties there are people living in the state, but the Metro Atlanta area covers tons of counties in Northern Georgia. And because of that sprawl, you start to ask yourself questions. You say, well, if Atlanta were to go on a similar uptick in population the way some of these cities are projected to, huh,

where would the people go? Would we just continue to grow outward Well, there's some reasons that the cities obviously don't want to just continue to outwardly expand like to grow horizontally. I mean, one of the fungus exactly what one would be the impact on the natural landscape. Yes, so we have an interest in preserving earth to a certain extent. I mean, we do like to see ourselves as the conquerors of nature. But yeah, I mean we don't want to just swallow up the landscape around the

city with just more and more and more city. Yeah, which is one of the things that we talked about in the in the Coracant episode. Yeah, right, and it also kind of defeats the purpose of what a city is. I mean, the city's supposed to be getting all your people and your resources and your brains together in a close by area. I mean, if you've spread out to be one hundred miles across, is this still a city?

Does it function the way a city functions well? And especially concerning like like the quality of life for the residents, because first of all, it's going to make getting food, getting local food at any rate, a little bit more difficult because you can't grow farms in the middle of a city block. You could have an urban garden, certainly, but that's not really the same thing. Yeah, well, yes

you could. And one of the solutions to that, of course, could be vertical farming, which we've talked about on the show before, but is going to relate to the main topic of today's episode. Well. And also we in that episode on vertical farming, we brought up the fact that you can't be certain that you would be able to produce enough to meet the needs of your population. Yes,

so that's a big concern. So even with vertical farming and little urban gardens and things of that nature, you still have a very strong need for agriculture, which means you cannot continuously sprawl out with your city or else you'll suck to impact your ability to grow food. Yeah. Sure. Another problem with sprawl being that eventually, like you're in Atlanta, it's relatively common for people who live far out in the suburbs to work in the city and have commutes

of a couple hours each way. Before we moved to are the offices that we're in now, my commute was sometimes an hour or an hour and a half, and that was only I'm guessing right now, like maybe seven miles away from the office. Yeah, maybe, I mean, it really wasn't that far. I mean, yeah, it's a problem of of surface streets and traffic is closer to my house and now it takes me an hour to get here. In an hour, well you're taking foot Yeah, yeah, you're talking.

You're the foot power of the future. At our old office, I took public transportation, so it took me forty five minutes door to door, and now it takes me an hour. And as I joke about it, honestly, if I were to drive, it would take me ten minutes skating, sure, but that's aption in Atlanta yeah, oh of course, yeah, yeah, we're very lucky to be able to do that. But that does bring up another issue, which is pollution that's

caused by all of that commuter traffic. Right, So sitting in your car for an hour and a half, you know, crossing many miles of slow moving traffic stop and start. This is not efficient. You're wasting energy resources and you're creating a lot of carbon emissions in the process. Not to mention stress, just the stress of having to navigate

through a city, trying to get through traffic. So of course, the bigger the sprawl gets, unless you happen to be fortunate where your place of work is close to where you live, you have to deal with that, as does everybody else, and all of that has a huge negative impact on quality of life. As well as the pollution aspect.

You also start getting into issues of just a waste of resources in terms of duplication of businesses that could be serving a larger clientele than they currently are, which which you know, kind of comes comes back around to the concept of like sitting in a Starbucks and looking

across the street and seeing another Starbucks. That sort of thing you start talking about having you know to to create the water systems, the electrical systems, the sturdy outer walls, to create all of these buildings that are that are

serving the same function. Yeah. So, I mean, like this true story guys in my hometown, like where I grew up, which is in rural Georgia, which is no longer rural now it's developed, but back when I was growing up it was there is now a It's a very similar story to what Lauren was saying about being in a Starbucks and looking across the street and seeing another Starbucks, except it's not Starbucks, waffle house house. Look across five lanes of traffic at another waffle house, and that's the

story of Georgia. It sure is. Oh well, I mean there are some streets in Georgia where getting to the other side of the street is a commute, that's true. Yeah, and I'm not even kidding there streets. There are streets in Atlanta where once you're on one side of them, you just better stay there for the rest. That's where

you live now. Yeah. Yeah, we've we've talked about that in another episode two where we were chatting about redesigning cities to be better suited for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, that kind of thing. But all of this is why the idea of sprawl is not very attractive. So if people are in fact going to be moving into cities, which we expect to see that trend continue, how do we grow without getting bigger, like having our borders expand. Well, if we can't grow out, then we have to grow

up or down. Hey, hey, we haven't talked about subterranean life on this show. We can touch on that in this episode. So the main topic of today, maybe we should have announced earlier minutes ago, it is super tall buildings, the upward expansion of our cities, and eventually the creation of a vertical civilization. Now, one of the main things we're going to be talking about is tall buildings growth up from the ground. But it's also worth noting that

we could expand vertically in both directions. We could keep going deeper into the ground as well, depending upon obviously, depending upon the geography of the area you're talking about. Yeah, it would work less well in Miami, Yeah, no, or anywhere in Florida really, because you start digging down a little bit too far and you start eating water. Yeah, but the advantages of vertical expansion in cities, especially if you want to increase occupancy efficiency, is quite obvious, and

I want to use a very brief analogy. Okay, let's think about a Erubic's cube. Now, if you just got one layer of a Rubics cube, it's three squares by three squares. How many squares is that total? Not nine? Now you just add two levels to that, and it's not that you've doubled it, but so you've got cubed now on one side of the cube. So they're twenty

seven squares in total. So it's quite clear how expanding upward on an already existing city block really really increases the amount of people you can get into a closed space together. Right, You can create a lot more floor space that way than you would if you were to just try and build outward, especially considering things like geographic limitations, whether it's you know, mountains or a river, anything along

those lines, Building up maybe a much better option. Can I tell the folks at home that also, I'm just holding a Rubik's cube right now. Yeah, we have a studio Rubix cube. So it's actually driving me a little crazy because it used to be solved and now it's not. Oh, and I do want to put in here that that super tall buildings don't solve all of the problems of fitting people into an area, as say, traffic patterns will tell you there's lots of infrastructure issues that you have

to work in there too. But yes, supertall buildings are a great way to physically literally put people into a small footprint of space. Oh, definitely, they come with plenty of their own challenges, and we're going to have to talk about those and later on in this episode. Sure.

I think I think one thing we can look at is if we take an actual example from real life and to use that as sort of a way of talking about not just the challenges but also some of the solutions that we've seen so far in designing buildings that are really quite tall. Yeah, one place that I think is a good place to look if you want to see this already being implemented. Obviously, this isn't some

idea we just made up. Cities are already expanding upward, and they have been for a long time, but they're embracing this idea even more lately. There are I think just a few years back, there were something like thirty super tall buildings in the world, and now they're more like ninety or something. So people are really embracing this idea, especially in many of the cities of the Middle East

and Asia. But one place to look is Shanghai. So I would like to encourage you if you have access to a computer right now and just to go look this up. There have been a couple of articles that have compared these photographs, but you don't even have to look at those. You can just Google search the images. Look at Shanghai, the downtown area the city of Shanghai in the nineteen eighties or early nineties or so, and then look at it now. Yeah, it's very dramatic the change. Yeah.

And one of the most dramatic buildings, I would argue in that new skyline is the Shanghai Tower. Oh yeah, and it is currently the second tallest building in the world. Yes, it is not the tallest, but the second tallest. It began construction or they began construction on the Shanghai Tower

in two thousand and eight. Now that was after a couple of years of you know, researching it, designing it, you know, making certain that all the ducks were in a row before they broke ground on construction, because if you go online start looking up people having conversations about this building, those go back to the early two thousands. Yeah, but in two thousand and eight that's when they actually started construction, and it conclcluted just last year, in twenty fifteen.

But I think that design process really did help, because the Shanghai Tower seems to me to incorporate a lot of really smart design decisions that help give me a better picture of what the future of super tall buildings really does look like. Yeah, and it's a tall sucker. I mean six hundred and thirty two meters tall, which is two thousand and seventy three feet, and it has one hundred and twenty one above ground floors, so they

did go below ground too. You've got you know, some basement levels in there too, not where they keep the trolls and the dungeons. That's right, that all of the gelatinous cubes. Yeah, I love the D and D references. So in total, the building has five hundred twenty one thousand square meters of floor space, so half a million square meters of floor space across those hundred and twenty one floors. For our American friends. A meter is more

than a foot asmous amount of space. It has one hundred and six elevators which can move its speeds of eighteen meters per second, which is terrifyingly fast. Yeah. I bet that's fun for your ears. Yeah, that's fifty nine feet per second. Yeah, so almost six stories, almost six floors per second. Imagine going one one thousand and you've just shot past six floors. You went from floor one to six. And this is going to touch on something that we will have to address later in the episode.

But some of the challenges of designing buildings this tall is occupant flow. Sure. I mean yeah, once you start making something that's more like a vertical city than just a regular building, you have to think of its elevators and up and down corridors, kind of like you would design major thoroughfares in a city. We're in a nine story building where our office is trying to get an elevator at lunch occasionally. We have a bank of four elevators that are in the main elevator space, right, and

another two that are off to the side. Off to the side one of those two, one of those two is operational for us, and the other one isn't and there's a secret elevator that's operated by a strange man who sort of resembles Steve Bashimi, and he speaks in little coons. That's true. But sometimes Julie's in there and she gives you important information about science. This is also true.

That hasn't happened in a long time. But the Bank of four, one of the issues there is that often they aren't all working, and we only have nine stories, like only nine floors in this building. But if you've ever tried to catch an elevator when those aren't working, you wait a long time. Now, imagine that across a one and twenty one floor building. Yeah, you might. You might have to bring a lunch with you whenever you're going to go and use the elevator, unless you have

really good elevator flow control. So this particular speed of elevator means that you could go from the basement level to the observation deck in less than a minute. Now, I suspect, with one hundred and six elevators, although I couldn't find any confirmation of this, that they probably have certain floors where you would have to transfer from one elevator to another, because, as we'll talk about later, if you want a super long elevator shaft, there's some big

problems that come along with that. Yeah, so my guess is that there are probably some floors where you have to actually get off the elevator, transfer to a different elevator, and continue upward. But that is just a guess. And if you work in Shanghai Tower, please contact us and let us know. I'm very curious about that. Yeah. Yeah, it's also funny that they have fans to control the atmospheric pressure so that you don't end up having too many problems with your ears, not when you're going up.

They said that when you're going up, it's not so bad. It's when you're coming down and the pressure's increasing that there's a problem. So the fans actually pull air out of the cabin wow as you descend, so that the transition is more gentle on your ears. Otherwise it could be uncomfortable. Yeah. Another really interesting aspect of the design of this super tall building is the exterior. If you look at a picture of Shanghai Tower, it's not just

a giant block going straight up. It twists. It looks like like a little cinnamon twist. It's a twisty shape. It's about one hundred and twenty degrees rotation on the twist. And if you look to that, you might just think, well, maybe they were just trying to be kind of quirky and ye look eye catching and to like kind of thumb the nose at the rest of the world. But no, according to the architecture firm that designed it, that's very functional. Yeah.

Apparently it reduces windload on the building by twenty four percent, which is obviously really important when you've got that much surface area. Yeah, that the wind can push against and you can sometimes get typhoon strength winds in that area. You want to be able to make sure that you minimize any risk to the building or its occuments. Yeah.

One thing I know I've read in one of our sources, I can't remember which one, was talking about how the higher and higher you go, when once you get into super tall and megatall building territory, the forces of the winds that you're dealing with applying pressure to the building are as strong as dealing with earthquakes. Well, and I just think about, like, if you were to hold a

read of some sort something a semi flexible like a ruler. Yeah. Like, and you have something that's that's got a little bit of give to it, and you you just do a little motion at the bottom. You see how much it gets magnified towards the top. Yeah. Well, again, if you're working on the one hundred and twentieth floor of this building, you don't want there to be that much sway. By the way, I got seasick at the office today. Yeah.

According to according to that architectural firm Ginstler, the give that would happen if they didn't have these measures in place would be five feet of sway, which just pretty significant. Yeah, that's horrifying. And it goes back to what we were talking about in our episode about weather, our episodes about weather with Jule. There's more air than truck, and so you've got you've got a lot of you've got a lot of air pushing at buildings. Get forward thinking more

wind than truck. Yeah. So, in order to also cut back on this problem, they have a vibration damper at the top of the building. And by vibration damper they mean a big old honkin weight. Yeah, twelve hundred tons,

a mass of twelve hundred tons. That's not that much really, yeah, right, And it's it's got a bunch of pistons that surround it that can move this weight in whatever direction they need to, and it's on a computerized system, so if they detect any vibration in the building, the pistons move the weight in the opposite direction at the right speed in order to counteract that force and create a stationary building.

It's sort of like the idea of canceling out sound by having an opposite sound wave, where the two end up canceling one another out. Very similar because sound waves are physical waves. It's the exact same thing, really, so that's pretty cool. I can't imagine what that looks like. I really wish there had been a picture in the materials I went through, but I couldn't see anything where you could actually see what the system looks like, because I don't want anybody to know how they make the

secret sauce. In my mind, is just an enormous metal cube surrounded by pistons that can just gently push it in whatever direction. But I'm sure that's not entirely accurate. But let's also picturing event horizon. Honestly, guys, let's also talk about the quote unquote skin of this building. So that's how they describe It's how we talked about it in our video episode about vertical cities. But by skin, really we're almost talking like a glass case that is

around this building. Yeah, and these are part of the energy saving features of the building too, because this is a big concern you have. I don't know if you could necessarily say that a skyscraper uses more energy inherently than I don't know the same amount of normal residence would, but there are certainly ways that you could help make a skyscraper more energy efficient for its occupants and thus have less carbon emissions and the production of energy and

stuff like that. So one of the most obvious factors you can imagine is optimizing the building to allow for natural light if you have to use less artificial lighting, that's a thing that helps. But another big one would be climate control. And if you can sort of come up with a design for a building that allows you to spend as little energy as possible lighting up rooms and cooling down rooms when it's hot, and heating up rooms when it's cold, that's sort of your sweet spot.

That's the maximum for design efficiency and what did they do to try to solve this. Well, essentially they created you know those coffee mugs that have insulating walls. Yeah, it's like a people insulating mug. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I described it as we if we ignore the twist, the easiest way to imagine this is you've got a skyscraper. Let's say it's more or less circular. So you've got a circular skyscraper, a cylinder that goes up, and then you have a slightly larger

cylinder around that. That's the one that's made out of glass. So the space between the inner cylinder and the outer cylinder, that's these atriums that go throughout the building all the way up to the top. Inside the inner cylinder, that's where you have all your office space, retail, hotel, whatever happens to be inside. So the atriums are allowing for that moderation of temperature fluctuations. It also creates public space

for people to meet in, so it has a dual purpose. Yeah, I've heard they have a little bit of green space in those two. Yeah, they look like little parks, at least the designs I've seen. Yeah, so you go outside, and they have trees and they have green space and you know, picnic tables things like that. Yeah, outside, inner, outside, it's almost like it's almost like stepping out feet up. It's like stepping out into a sun room that happens to be about, you know, five hundred feet over the surface.

But they you know, it doesn't go it's not like it's it's uninterrupted all the way up from the bottom to the top. It's not like you go out on the first floor and you can look all the way up to the top. There's a lazing climbing vine. It has segmented levels, like a lot of very tall buildings, I think. Yeah, and they actually have quite a few of these levels. They're twenty one total, and they call them sky lobbies, So you can go out to the

sky lobby. And with twenty one you would have imagined that that means that of the one hundred and twenty floors, you would divide that into the twenty one different segments that would represent the various atriums. And they do stretch several floors each, so you know, when you haven't a seat by the window at your office, you're actually looking out into an atrium. Not directly out to the outside world, which is kind of neat, and I like that idea a lot. I like the idea that the observation deck

is essentially one of these atriums. So I think it's a pretty cool design. And uh it took me a while to figure out because originally I had the script that Joe wrote about these vertical cities and you talked about this, and I was having so much trouble imagining what it was because it was like a skin of glass of atriom. And then when I finally saw the picture, my oh, of course, explain it right now. Just you explained it perfectly, fine. I just was having trouble imagining

what it was until I actually saw the picture. Oh cool, I was like, oh, okay, now I get it. You explained it for video. Yeah, and then there will be pictures in the video, so that helps. But yeah, that's uh well, I thought this was one of the videos we were going to do with that new artistic style where it's just a black screen with job and talking to be the I'm gonna do that one for the future of total Darkness, just to be that one that and I'll be wearing very emo makeup but it'll be

incompletely but it won't matter. Yeah, it's just as a statement. Yea, No, you have to know that it's on me A lot of hot topic outfit that'll be in the DVD extras. Yeah, Okay,

getting back to Shanghai Tower. So another way that this sort of incorporates the future of tall building design is that it also tries to cut down on its on its net energy dependence on the rest of the grid by so not only being efficient reducing its need for artificial lighting, heating, and cooling, but also generating energy of its own. Yeah. So that has wind turbines vertically aligned wind turbines at the top of the very top of

this building. I don't know exactly how much energy they generate. I would guess that it's not a huge amount, but still, I mean some is better than none. Yeah. They said that the goal is to reduce energy usage by twenty one percent. So if you think of it that way, if you go with one hundred percent of the energy needed to run the operations inside that building, ideally these wind turbines would would offset that by twenty one percent.

That's the hope, that's the target. I think it will take some time for actual data to be collected to find out how because again construction just completed last year, they'll probably take some time to find out how effective these actually are in offsetting the energy costs of the building. But it is still very forward thinking to create a system to try and alleviate some of that. And it also once it's the design also helps in water conservation,

not just energy conservation. If you look at the very top, like if you look at an aerial view of this building, it kind of looks like it's got a big yawning mouth. Yeah, some monster creature, right, which is actually a funnel, and it's meant to catch rain. The rain water it can then use the building systems can use for various functions. I think I read somewhere that it was used for cooling. I would I would imagine so probably also I would

imagine for watering the green spaces. I that that's used as well, but it's at any rate. They said that that could lead to a forty percent reduction in water consumption, which is probably why I'm mostly thinking like watering green spaces, because that takes so much water. Yeah, so I would imagine that that's a large part of that or in what's it called great gray water for like toilets and

stuff like that. H Yeah, that's a possibility. I don't know if that's what they do, but I would hope that that's what they would do, considering how many toilets must be in that building. It's a lot of floors. So that's kind of the Shanghai Tower. But there are other towers that are either complete or in the process of being built that also are going to be pointing our way toward the future of super tall buildings. Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of this development is

in Asia and the Middle East. So we've looked at one of these towers in East Asia, but we should probably look at one in the Middle East. Right. So the Jetta Tower, which used to be called the Kingdom Tower, it's currently under construction. It's projected to be completed in twenty twenty, so we've still got a ways to go before it's done. But it's in Saudi Arabia. It will be a full kilometer in height, which actually is a

reduction of what they wanted. They wanted it to be a mile high when they were designing it, but when they started doing soil samples of the area where it's going to be built. They realized the ground would not support a mile high skyscraper, so they cut back to a kilometer high. Wouldn't that have been I mean, I wouldn't wish this upon anyone, but wouldn't that have been an amazing story for future historians to recount back on that time a mile high skyscraper sank into the desert.

It would be an incredible, incredible, incredible tragic story. Unless we're assuming nobody's in it. Sorry, Yeah, like it's on the ribbon cutting ceremony. This this building is two hundred stories tall. This building is one hundred and seventy story This building is one hundred and forty stories. It's just going that would have been funny. But that's hopefully nothing along those lines is going to happen with this kilometer high building. But I think, as we mentioned so it's

currently still under construction. Yes, and it's very interesting as well, and that its shape is triangular, So it's the reason for the triangular shape is similar to that one hundred and twenty degree twisting rotation that we talked about with the Shanghai Tower. Yeah, it's to reduce windload. But it also creates a very distinctive look for this building. And part of it is that its design is kind of inspired by plants that grow out on the borders of

water over in Saudi Arabia. That was one of the inspirations for the design. It has fifty four normal elevators and five double decker elevators. I don't know how the double deck or elevators work for people who, you know, want to get off on the floor, like the two people on each deck want to get off on the same floor. That seems like that would take extra long

to me. Like everyone on the second level of this elevator wants to get off at floor five, but so do the people on the first floor of that elevator. That would just make it twice as long, I would think. But anyway, stairway inside the elevator, maybe it could be. That's there's no reason there couldn't be that's a possibility, or at least a pole again, cargo net, who knows, but trampoline you guys, yeah, that's good or yah velcrow walls and you just have like little milkcrow gloves and

you just we have a lot of ideas. We've got a lot of ideas. So one of the interesting things I think about this particular tower is that from what I've read, no one expects this tower itself to be profitable, Like operating this tower will end up being a net loss as far as the economics are concerned. But the hope is that it spurs on investment and development in the area in general, and so it becomes almost symbolic like this is our future, this is the gateway to

our future, and the net effect will be positive. Even if the specific effect of that building is that it's it's like a money pit. Well, sure, as the community grows up around it, it's you know, for the same reason that I guess cities get real excited about hosting the Super Bowl or whatever it is. You're bringing in all these people and they're all potential consumers. Yeah. And another thing is I mean, we, right now, I think largely think of buildings, even large buildings, is kind of

different than we think of pieces of public infrastructure. But I wonder if in the future, I don't know, these big buildings, if we really do embrace the concept of a vertic civilization, if the skyscrapers that house. Our vertical cities will be something more like a piece of public infrastructure rather than a building that somebody invests in with the hope of making money. Well, we also have to point out that some of these buildings, for example, the

Shanghai Tower are state owned. Yeah, not privately owned as which is exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, that makes sense if you're trying to, i don't know, encourage help your city grow, it'd be kind of like building roads or freeways or something. Yeah, if you build it, they will come. So ideally the elevator should only be able to go up. Well, I live here now. It used to live on that side of the street, Now I live on this floor.

All right, newsflash, we talked about buildings a lot, like way more than we anticipated when we came into this room. It's almost as though we like talking. Yeah, So, as it turns out, we have a lot more to say. But the episode was stretching to epic lengths, so we're going to cut short our conversation right now. But in our next episode we will conclude our discussion about supertall buildings and vertical cities and vertical civilizations. So you'll definitely

want to tune in for that. Yeah, it's gonna be some of the some of the really uh out there ideas. Yeah, this is all the practical stuff sort of. So neat time laid the foundation. Now let's build this sucker higher and higher. So I'm going to wrap this up by saying, if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, definitely send them our way. We love to hear from you. Our email address is FW thinking at houstuffworks dot com, or you can always drop us a

line on Twitter or Facebook. Twitter our handle is FW thinking. On Facebook, just search fw thinking. We will pop up. You can leave us a message there and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places,