Dutch architect Neville Mars and co-designers at the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF) drafted plans for what it calls the Beijing Boom Tower (BBT). This "vertical neighborhood" offers the living space of Los Angeles in an area 10 times as dense as Manhattan, with parks, retail areas, residential housing and gyms contained in a single block.

"The idea is to test if architecture, as a discipline, can respond to these spatial demands, and what's the result if it does that," Mars says.

And its residents could commute to work on the D-Rail, which is an electomagnetic travelator DCF designed to loop around the capital's Fourth Ring Road. This hybrid between a high-speed train and people-mover, which would operate above the road, supported by columns, would continuously rotate in opposite directions, slowing at boarding points to let people on and off.

"This system allows you to access any point on the Fourth Ring very fast, and also, you can get off anywhere," Mars says.

While it sounds futuristic, the D-Rail is today technologically viable. But, as British archetectural writer Adrian Hornsby points out: "The thing that makes building these models unappealing is more expense than technology."

But the purpose of these prototypes, he says, is more about inspiring people to understand the challenges surrounding urbanization and to use more imagination to solve them than getting them built.

"It's a good basis to get people to think about them more creatively and more imaginatively, even if it doesn't necessarily solve the problem," says DCF researcher Liu Chang.

(China Daily October 8, 2007)