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Commisionned by Grupo Karim's, and designed by Stefano Boeri Architetti, the first Smart Forest City in Mexico will focus on innovation and environmental quality. The city balances green and built spaces, and is completely food and energy self-sufficient.

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Save this picture! Courtesy of Stefano Boeri Architetti

Smart Forest City - Cancun is the first Forest City of the new millennium, and it can host up to 130.000 inhabitants. Imagined instead of a shopping center, the open and international city will be built on a 557 ha parcel, with 400 hectares reserved for green spaces. In fact, the 400 different species in the project were chosen by botanist and landscape architect Laura Gatti. They will form the 7.500.000 plants in the project, 260.000 of which will be trees. With a ratio of 2.3 trees per inhabitant, the Smart Forest City “will absorb 116.000 tons of carbon dioxide with 5.800 tons of CO 2 stocked per year”. Public parks, private gardens, green roofs, and green facades, help create a balance with the built footprint.

With circular economy at the core of its conception, the city is surrounded by solar panels and agricultural fields, making it completely food and energy self-sufficient. Water is gathered at the entrance of the City, next to the desalination tower, and it is distributed “by a system of navigable canals in the whole settlement up to the agricultural fields that surround the urban area”. Within the city, people circulate via internal electric and semi-automatic mobility, leaving their cars at the edges of the city. 3 networks of energy infrastructure, mobility, and green offer each inhabitant all the services he needs.

Save this picture! Courtesy of Stefano Boeri Architetti

On another hand, Smart Forest City – Cancun offers flexible distribution of the built structures in the five big sectors defined by the master plan. Finally, the city holds “a center for advanced research that could host all worldwide university departments, international organizations, and companies that deal with very important sustainability issues and the future of the planet”. These departments will welcome researchers and students from all over the world.