La Malaisie pourrait bien faire prochainement figure d’exemple en matière d’innovation environnementale et urbaine avec l’implantation d’une ville unique au monde. 20 kilomètres carrés, 700 000 habitants et un écosystème environnemental proche de la forêt amazonienne ou de la Grande Barrière de corail. Ce projet d’envergure, c’est celui de Forest City, un concept de ville du futur imaginé par le cabinet d’architecture Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (Lava). Autosuffisante, cette future ville malaisienne abritera une concentration importante de végétaux et d’animaux et se présentera comme un laboratoire pour l’avenir de l’urbanisme. LAVA won 2nd prize in an international competition to design a new city in Malaysia. LAVA’s concept sees the city defined not as one iconic building, nor as a skyline, but as a central public space, a real forest. Its an inverse city skyline where the icon of the city is a public space, not an object/building. This central space demonstrates the equation: PEOPLE = CITY. From an object to a place. Future city notions are embedded into LAVA’s overall concept – a ‘public city’, a central public space surrounded by buildings; a ‘layered city’, where people, railways and traffic are separated with vehicles underground; a ‘loop city’, a closed loop system reusing it’s resources and controlling the out-flow; and a ‘sponge city’, with recycling processes hidden underground. A group of buildings step down towards this green public centre and are an architectural interpretation of the rainforest, with various layers of program and vertical stratification. Forest City, by Chinese developer Country Garden, is a new 20 square kilometre green smart city on reclaimed land in southern Malaysia.