Vertical Living and the Garden City: The Sustainability of an Urban Figure

In Europe, the debate on sustainable urban development in housing has led to the formulation of a set of generic questions regarding the future of human settlements in the context of a society which is becoming more and more individualistic and mobile. The movements associated with this debate are more and more complex to foresee. In this debate, re-evaluating the sustainability of existing urbanization processes and settlement patterns, as developed during the 20th century, is at the top of the planner’s agenda. For European urban planners, one of the main tasks is to find an alternative to worldwide processes occurring around cities known as urban sprawl, i.e. the development of individual housing as a dominant dwelling type and the use of the automobile as its “domestic extension”. In this context, alternative housing programmes appeared in the last two decades offering a more environmentally friendly solution than the “individual house + car package”. This solution tends to re-examine the “ecological potential” of the traditional form of dwelling that optimizes local services and minimizes automobile transport.