Faced with a growing population, housing shortages and global overcrowding, architects are reimagining the ways in which we design homes and communities. Building vertical villages is one very real answer to these problems, with designs encompassing green outdoor spaces, thriving social hubs and healthy living spaces. Shift your gaze skyward – these exciting projects could be coming to a city near you...

In countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where city populations are vast and rapidly rising, innovative solutions are needed to tackle space shortages. By building up, these developments allow residents to retain valuable private living space in a cramped city, while also offering collective areas to socialise. A new take on the standard tower block, the vertical village seeks to create active, community-oriented living while minimising isolation.

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On the face of it, any building that accommodates a number of people in cellular, vertical housing could be considered a vertical village, but the modern take is more than simply cramming in as many people as possible. This architectural vision is focused on creating living spaces that boost physical and mental well being, and allow integration without sacrificing privacy.

One such building is the award-winning Interlace by architectural firm OMA, which was named as the best building on the planet at the 2015 World Architecture Festival. The design features an innovative collection of horizontal apartment blocks stacked in hexagons around eight external courtyards. It's been hailed as a "trailblazer for contemporary thinking" for its clever integration of indoor and outdoor space.

Judges at the festival praised the design for being one of the most ambitious residential developments in Singapore’s history. If it catches on, and it looks likely to, this style of building has the potential to change the entire skyline of cities like Singapore, moving them away from the traditional high rise blocks.

The population of Singapore is more than five and a half million people and rising, with the majority living on the main island that measures only 32km end to end. It's also the third richest country in the world per capita so there is money to be spent on solving the architectural problems this poses. Most accommodation is built upwards to make the most of the limited space, leading to cramped living conditions, which projects such as the Interlace hopes to fix.

Interlace is one of the largest new residences in Singapore, built between 2007 and 2013. Described by its architects as a "deconstructed high-rise", it comes complete with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a surprising amount of greenery. Many believe it’s also a prototype for affordable living – with 90% of the properties currently occupied.

The structure is composed of 31 apartment blocks, stacked six storeys tall and it's 70 metres wide. The stacking allows light and air to flow through the building, creating a more open city landscape. There's also a mixture of internal and external environments with shared and private outdoor spaces on multiple levels. 

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Interlace architect Ole Scheeren explained to the FT.com how isolating traditional high rise concepts could be: “It has very little to do with how people live together, apart from their existence in their isolated apartments.” So he messed with this concept, interspersing apartments with a 1km jogging track, tennis courts, exercise stations, play zones, party pavilions and barbecue areas. “The entire concept of The Interlace is increased privacy but also a strong sense of community,” he added.

Of key importance to many of the vertical village dreamers and designers is self-sufficiency, and buildings that work for the good for the environment. By using solar power, hyper-modern recycling techniques and integrating renewable energy technology, many complexes can make a positive impact on their local ecology.

The Hyperion, designed by Paris-based architecture practice  Vincent Callebaut and agroecologist Amlankusum, is intended to help solve environmental pollution. The pair have suggested it should be built outside New Delhi, to be completed by 2022. 

The design is a jungle-like structure comprising of a six-tower complex, each tower measuring 36 storeys high. Eco measures planned include a permaculture greenhouse for self-sufficient food production, plus community orchards, a phyto purification lagoon to be used as a freshwater source and a natural swimming pool for leisure.

Architect Callebaut is keen to empower occupants to grow their own vegetables on balconies, rooftops, and also in modified greenhouses - like modern allotments. He’s also designed a hydroponics system for the structure, which will farm fish and utilise their waste as a fertiliser for crops.

The village's superstructure is made using locally-sourced wood. The designers opted for this material as its life cycle has the most limited carbon footprint, making it the most environmentally friendly option.

Combined with wood, a steel and concrete substructure was also chosen for its stability. In this location, the architects needed to ensure the building would be earthquake resistant. The finished structure, shown here in renders, looks like nothing else on Earth but could be the future of housing in our ever-growing cities.

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Designers Rajiv Sewtahal, Yushang Zhang, Riemer Postma, and Qianqian Cai focused on creating space without taking up a large building footprint. They developed a cell-based structure that uses an unusual honeycomb design to offer the most amount of space horizontally and vertically.

The project, entitled 'Vertical Village: A Sustainable Way of Village-style Living', was awarded first prize in the d3 Housing Tomorrow 2011 Competition. The criteria called for "transformative solutions that advanced sustainable thought, building performance, and social interaction through the study of intrinsic environmental geometries, social behaviours, urban implications, and programmatic flows."

What about inside these vertical villages? Well, privacy and space come at a premium, but architects have worked with interior specialists to create homes that are pleasant to live in, with the maximum amount of personal space possible. This bedroom by KNQ Associates from the Interlace development shows the interplay of space, light and modern design and technology.

Homes come complete with hi-tech temperature and climate controls, intelligent lighting that reacts to the light outside, and, where possible, private outdoor spaces in the form of tessellated or graduated balconies.

The individual units differ in size and layout to make the most of the unusual shape of the building but the finish is uniformly sleek and modern.

After his success with Interlace, Ole Scheeran revealed plans for a pair of skyscrapers in Vancouver, Canada this year. The Barclay building is designed in a similar way, with irregularly stacked glass boxes interlaced with greenery.

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The towers will measure no more than 550 feet (168m) – the maximum allowed on the site – and will house around 650 residences. Around a third will be social housing. His plan is that the boxes will create "a lot of pockets, and ins and outs" for terraces and balconies where trees will be planted.

A bridge on the first floor will connect the two towers and host communal amenities, including a gym, shops and a daycare centre. The bridge will feature a garden. "We're working on a set of interesting housing and apartment typologies," Scheeran said. "It's not like single-storey apartments like you would usually have in the tower, but much more of a sense of living in a house rather than a tower."

Vertical villages are designed to be reactive to the environment they’re built in, and that's certainly the case with this community in Liuzhou, China, built by Dutch architecture firm MVRD. Central to the design of these 2,700 new homes was the need to protect the city’s limestone mountains from further erosion and pay homage to the landscape. The answer came in a string of different units, some high rise, some low, that spread over the mountains containing vertical villages and more traditional dwellings. 

Dubbed Long Tan Park, the construction follows the natural topography of the slopes, with floors and walls of houses making use of the local rocks. Each unit becomes a vertical village of its own, offering splendid views of the sprawling hills.

The irregularity of the structure isn’t an accident. The spacing of the homes serves several functions, too. Intervals of three metres between the houses and the rocks allow for natural ventilation. The voids in between the vertical dwellings create a web of streets and stairs through the vertical villages for integration and easy access.

The Cloud Corridor is a "future concept for residential design in Los Angeles", according to its architects MAD. It’s just one of several virtual village ideas in development by the architects and put nature centre stage in this famously urban city.

The design reorients the streets vertically, with nine interconnected residential towers that redistribute the city to connect disparate neighbourhoods into an upright village, complete with public spaces and gardens in the sky. 

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In its lofty goal to become a green urban landmark, Cloud Corridor proposes innovative ways to incorporate the natural world. A lower podium has been designed to serve as a green public park and entrance to the proposed new Metro station. The sculpted terrain will be covered with a grass lawn and dotted with trees to give the suggestion of rolling hills within its urban setting.

One of the biggest obstacles facing vertical villages is how to create pleasant outdoor environments for a large number of people in heavily built-up areas. Many of the prototypes and designs champion greenery growing from every nook and cranny, on rooftops, as well as vertically in living walls. But as much as greenery elevates the living environment, outdoor space and natural light still present a challenge.

In its manifesto, MAD’s Urban Forest is described as "a high rise tower for the youngest urban centre of China, Chongqing." Its plans focus on creating modern high-quality living spaces for a large number of people, but not to the detriment of their physical and mental wellbeing.

The Urban Forest is organically structured, with cleverly incorporated green spaces, including multi-storey sky gardens, floating patios and serene gathering spaces. The shape of the tower mimics vertiginous hillsides and its architectural form is inspired by the movement of air, wind and light.

Active retirement communities are becoming ever more popular. There’s a growing trend for high-rise retirement developments located in the centre of cities, where the action is. The vertical village concept here becomes one of integration − keeping older people involved in their communities and providing the care they need, with the freedom they desire.

In New South Wales, Australia, an inquiry into retirement villages recommended integrating seniors’ apartment into high-rise residential developments. This would allow retirees to benefit from the modern design and technology of these buildings, as well as ease isolation by connecting them with the infrastructure of major cities.

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Europe, too, is catching up with the vertical village trend, with big plans to rejuvenate the Paris suburbs. This year, architect Sou Fujimoto, Nicolas Laisné and Dimitri Roussel of illustrious French architect firm Compagnie de Phalsbourg won a competition to build a new mixed-use development in Paris with a design titled simply 'Vertical Village'.

Like the Hyperion in New Delhi, the structure is to be built almost entirely of wood and will be a 'gateway' to the Parisian suburb of Rosny-sous-Bois. It will be a truly mixed-use building, with office space and metres of housing – a large portion of which will be social. To connect the residents, there will be shared spaces spread across the ground floor and rooftops, including a food court, a daycare centre, community centres, an escape game and a rooftop bar.

The design is ambitious, reaching 50 metres at its tallest point and extending 120 metres in length. The only planned use of concrete is in the wind-bracing core and the two lower levels, which will form a car park made from reinforced concrete. The two structures will be connected by a bridge, with glazed facades, green balconies, rooftops and irregular canopies supported by slim white columns.

There are plenty of fantastic and imaginative buildings already built, or at least in the design or building stages. But what about further into the future? How are architects going beyond this first iteration of a vertical village? Evolo, a trade architecture magazine runs a regular skyscraper competition, challenging dreamers to take these concepts to the next level.

Among the entries is Espiral 3500, a design that recreates horizontal streets and village life in a vertical structure. Based on a village on the Eastern coast of Spain, it takes the traditional and reconfigures it into a modern form. It's also designed to absorb the ebb and flow of a huge migration of tourists to the coast during the summer, without negatively impacting locals.

Another entry, the Heal-berg, is designed not just to be self-sufficient, but to give back to the planet, helping to "cease, heal and reverse climate change". Its methods include converting carbon dioxide to oxygen by zapping it with laser, generating electricity from wind and solar power, and even creating power from the salt in seawater. It also plans to use drones to create greater mobility around the structure − certainly a bold idea for a brave new world.

Vertical villages have been lauded for their ability to tackle the demands of a growing population, delivering high-tech solutions for our cramped living situation. Such projects propose an optimistic remedy for modern living, which has become overcrowded, unsustainable and for many, isolating. Here's hoping the way we live in the future will help marry comfortable, spacious living, with our basic human needs for community and company.

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