In his seminal book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, the eminent biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson wrote, “Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all.”

The author goes on to explain that we must “dedicate fully half the surface of the earth to nature”, and it is this guiding principle that has inspired WOHA architects to conceptualise the Fifty-Fifty City. This idea was further expounded in a scheme for a six-square-kilometre brownfield patch in Singapore, where WOHA identified the key to reconciling the opposing demands of a re-wilded natural environment and that of a high-density high-amenity one.

The solution, it seems, lies in how we design for urban mobility. More specifically, by diverting vehicles and services underground, and not letting them interfere with the outdoor environment.

Above ground, greenways would take the place of roads; below ground, conduit roadways would interconnect buildings and tower clusters. Doing so would open up the ground level, where 50% of the land surface would host extremely high-density settlements, while the other 50% would be re-wilded and set aside for nature.

By resolving architectural prototypes, systems too can be a field of creativity. What other architectural prototypes can we rethink to yield innovative solutions?