With its broad strokes of thinking and long-term implementation, urban planning isn't the most exciting thing. But planning our cities in a more sustainable way is vital: one of the biggest and most pressing issue today is making our cities more livable, efficient and self-sufficient -- especially as urbanization is projected to increase dramatically in the next few decades. For more than 30 years, Belgian architect Luc Schuiten has taken a visionary approach to rethinking cities, in a biomimetic fashion. In his lush and fantastical renderings of what he calls "vegetal cities," urban centers are transformed into living, responsive architectures that merge nature with the man-made.

In the TEDxNantes video below (subtitles available), Schuiten explains how he believes that the tree's inherent structure is already sound, saying, "So why redesign the tree? Why redesign what was already there first?" and proposes that humans develop ways to plant trees, guide their growth, prune and graft them into dwellings that would populate these vegetal metropolises. Schuiten calls his approach to building "archiborescence": a portmanteau of "architecture" and "tree," using principles similar to biomimicry where one designs with nature as inspiration.

In this scheme of the "City of Habitarbres" (habitable trees), Schuiten explains how we might live amongst the trees, using biotextiles and bioluminescence: